etc. I have since its publication received some quite charming
letters from him.
What an ardent (and most justly) admirer he is of you. His work, I do
not doubt, will have a most potent influence versus Natural Selection.
The pendulum will now swing against us. The part which, I think, will
have most influence is when he gives whole series of cases, like that of
whalebone, in which we cannot explain the gradational steps; but such
cases have no weight on my mind--if a few fish were extinct, who on
earth would have ventured even to conjecture that lung had originated in
swim-bladder? In such a case as Thylacines, I think he was bound to say
that the resemblance of the jaw to that of the dog is superficial; the
number and correspondence and development of teeth being widely
different. I think, again, when speaking of the necessity of altering a
number of characters together, he ought to have thought of man having
power by selection to modify simultaneously or almost simultaneously
many points, as in making a greyhound or racehorse--as enlarged upon in
my "Domestic Animals.
Pages:
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403