ses.") What a complete
and awful smasher (and done like a "buttered angel") it is for Owen!
What a humbug he is to have left out the sentence in the lecture before
the orthodox Cambridge dons! I like Lubbock's paper very much: how well
he writes. (119/3. Sir John Lubbock's paper was a review of Leydig on
the Daphniidae. M'Donnell's was "On the Homologies of the Electric Organ
of the Torpedo," afterwards used in the "Origin" (see Edition VI., page
150).) M'Donnell, of course, pleases me greatly. But I am very curious
to know who wrote the Protozoa article: I shall hear, if it be not a
secret, from Lubbock. It strikes me as very good, and, by Jove, how Owen
is shown up--"this great and sound reasoner"! By the way, this reminds
me of a passage which I have just observed in Owen's address at Leeds,
which a clever reviewer might turn into good fun. He defines (page xc)
and further on amplifies his definition that creation means "a process
he knows not what." And in a previous sentence he says facts shake his
confidence that the Apteryx in New Zealand and Red Grouse in England are
"distinct creations." So that he has no confidence that these birds
were produced by "processes he knows not what!" To what miserable
inconsistencies and rubbish this truckling to opposite opinions leads
the great generaliser! (119/4. In the "Historical Sketch," which forms
part of the later editions of the "Origin," Mr. Darwin made use of
Owen's Leeds Address in the manner sketched above. See "Origin," Edition
VI., page xvii.)

Farewell: I heartily rejoice in the clear merit of this number. I hope
Mrs. Huxley goes on well. Etty keeps much the same, but has not got up
to the same pitch as when you were here. Farewell.

LETTER 120. TO JAMES LAMONT. Down, February 25th [1861].

I am extremely much obliged for your very kind present of your beautiful
work, "Seasons with the Sea-Horses;" and I have no doubt that I shall
find much interesting from so careful and acute an observer as yourself.
(120/1. "Seasons with the Sea-Horses; or, Sporting Adventures in the
Northern Seas." London, 1861. Mr. Lamont (loc. cit., page 273) writes:
"The polar bear seems to me to be nothing more than a variety of the
bears inhabiting Northern Europe, Asia, and America; and it surely
requires no very great stretch of the imagination to suppose that
this variety was originally created, not as we see him now, but by
individuals of Ursus arctos in Siberia, who, finding thei