This was not a letter I could accept. If Mr. Darwin had said that by some inadvertence, which he was unable to excuse or account for, a blunder had been made which he would at once correct so far as was in his power by a letter to the _Times_ or the _Athenæum_, and that a notice of the erratum should be printed on a flyleaf and pasted into all unsold copies of the “Life of Erasmus Darwin,” there would have been no more heard about the matter from me; but when Mr. Darwin maintained that it was a common practice to take advantage of an opportunity of revising a work to interpolate a covert attack upon an opponent, and at the same time to misdate the interpolated matter by expressly stating that it appeared months sooner than it actually did, and prior to the work which it attacked; when he maintained that what was being done was “so common a practice that it never occurred,” to him—the writer of some twenty volumes—to do what all literary men must know to be inexorably requisite, I thought this was going far beyond what was permissible in honourable warfare, and that it was time, in the interests of literary and scientific morality, even more than in my own, to appeal to public opinion. I was particularly struck with the use of the words “it never occurred to me,” and felt how completely of a piece it was with the opening paragraph of the “Origin of Species.” It was not merely that it did not occur to Mr. Darwin to state that the article had been modified since it was written—this would have been bad enough under the circumstances but that it did occur to him to go out of his way to say what was not true. There was no necessity for him to have said anything about my book. It appeared, moreover, inadequate to tell me that if a reprint of the English Life was wanted (which might or might not be the case, and if it was not the case, why, a shrug of the shoulders, and I must make the best of it), Mr. Darwin might perhaps silently omit his note about my book, as he omitted his misrepresentation of the author of the “Vestiges of Creation,” and put the words “revised and corrected by the author” on his title-page.