ennett or anyone else should
bring in the action of the mind as a leading cause of variation, seeing
the beautiful and complex adaptations and modifications of structure in
plants, which I do not suppose they would say had minds.

I have finished the first volume, and am half-way through the first
proof of the second volume, of my confounded book, which half kills me
by fatigue, and which I much fear will quite kill me in your good
estimation.

If you have leisure I should much like a little news of you and your
doings and your family.--Ever yours very sincerely,

CH. DARWIN.

* * * * *

_Holly House, Barking, E. November 24, 1870._

Dear Darwin,--Your letter gave me very great pleasure. We still agree, I
am sure, on nineteen points out of twenty, and on the twentieth I am not
inconvincible. But then I must be convinced by facts and arguments, not
by high-handed ridicule such as Claparede's.

I hope you see the difference between such criticisms as his, and that
in the last number of the _North American Review_, where my last chapter
is really criticised, point by point; and though I think some of it very
weak, I admit that some is very strong, and almost converts me from the
error of my ways.

As to your new book, I am sure it will not make me think less highly of
you than I do, unless you do, what you have never done yet, ignore
facts and arguments that go against you.

I am doing nothing just now but writing articles and putting down
anti-Darwinians, being dreadfully ridden upon by a horrid
old-man-of-the-sea, who has agreed to let me have the piece of land I
have set my heart on, and which I have been trying to get of him since
last February, but who will not answer letters, will not sign an
agreement, and keeps me week after week in anxiety, though I have
accepted his own terms unconditionally, one of which is that I pay rent
from last Michaelmas! And now the finest weather for planting is going
by. It is a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid
imitation of a Welsh valley in little, and will enable me to gather
round me all the beauties of the temperate flora which I so much admire,
or I would not put up with the little fellow's ways. The fixing on a
residence for the rest of your life is an important event, and I am not
likely to be in a very settled frame of mind for some time.

I am answering A. Murray's Geographical Distribution of Coleoptera for
my Ent