about 'Natural Selection' that I am
at all weak of faith on that article...But the first thing seems to me
to be to drive the fact of evolution into people's heads; when that is
once safe, the rest will come easy.")

Down, May 11th, 1880.

I had no intention to make you write to me, or expectation of your
doing so; but your note has been so far "cheerier" (299/2. "You are the
cheeriest letter-writer I know": Huxley to Darwin. See Huxley's "Life,"
II., page 12.) to me than mine could have been to you, that I must
and will write again. I saw your motive for not alluding to Natural
Selection, and quite agreed in my mind in its wisdom. But at the same
time it occurred to me that you might be giving it up, and that anyhow
you could not safely allude to it without various "provisos" too long to
give in a lecture. If I think continuously on some half-dozen structures
of which we can at present see no use, I can persuade myself that
Natural Selection is of quite subordinate importance. On the other hand,
when I reflect on the innumerable structures, especially in plants,
which twenty years ago would have been called simply "morphological" and
useless, and which are now known to be highly important, I can persuade
myself that every structure may have been developed through Natural
Selection. It is really curious how many out of a list of structures
which Bronn enumerated, as not possibly due to Natural Selection because
of no functional importance, can now be shown to be highly important.
Lobed leaves was, I believe, one case, and only two or three days ago
Frank showed me how they act in a manner quite sufficiently important to
account for the lobing of any large leaf. I am particularly delighted at
what you say about domestic dogs, jackals, and wolves, because from
mere indirect evidence I arrived in "Varieties of Domestic Animals" at
exactly the same conclusion (299/3. Mr. Darwin's view was that domestic
dogs descend from more than one wild species.) with respect to the
domestic dogs of Europe and North America. See how important in another
way this conclusion is; for no one can doubt that large and small dogs
are perfectly fertile together, and produce fertile mongrels; and how
well this supports the Pallasian doctrine (299/4. See Letter 80.) that
domestication eliminates the sterility almost universal between forms
slowly developed in a state of nature.

I humbly beg your pardon for bothering you with so long a note; but