e origin of life is
explained: surely it is worth while to attempt to follow out the action
of electricity, though we know not what electricity is.

If you should at any time do me the favour of writing to me, I should
be very much obliged if you would inform me whether you have yourself
examined Brehm's subspecies of birds; for I have looked through some of
his writings, but have never met an ornithologist who believed in his
[illegible]. Are these subspecies really characteristic of certain
different regions of Germany?

Should you write, I should much like to know how the German edition
sells.

LETTER 116. TO J.S. HENSLOW. October 26th [1860].

Many thanks for your note and for all the trouble about the seeds, which
will be most useful to me next spring. On my return home I will send the
shillings. (116/1. Shillings for the little girls in Henslow's parish
who collected seeds for Darwin.) I concluded that Dr. Bree had blundered
about the Celts. I care not for his dull, unvarying abuse of me,
and singular misrepresentation. But at page 244 he in fact doubts my
deliberate word, and that is the act of a man who has not the soul of a
gentleman in him. Kingsley is "the celebrated author and divine"
(116/2. "Species not Transmutable," by C.R. Bree. After quoting from the
"Origin," Edition II., page 481, the words in which a celebrated author
and divine confesses that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is
just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few
original forms, etc.," Dr. Bree goes on: "I think we ought to have had
the name of this divine given with this remarkable statement. I confess
that I have not yet fully made up my mind that any divine could have
ever penned lines so fatal to the truths he is called upon to
teach.") whose striking sentence I give in the second edition with his
permission. I did not choose to ask him to let me use his name, and as
he did not volunteer, I had of course no choice. (116/3. We are indebted
to Mr. G.W. Prothero for calling our attention to the following striking
passage from the works of a divine of this period:--"Just a similar
scepticism has been evinced by nearly all the first physiologists of the
day, who have joined in rejecting the development theories of Lamarck
and the 'Vestiges'...Yet it is now acknowledged under the high sanction
of the name of Owen that 'creation' is only another name for our
ignorance of the mode of production...while