...Please do not say to any one that I thought my book on Species would be fairly popular, and have a fairly remunerative sale (which was the height of my ambition), for if it prove a dead failure, it would make me the more ridiculous.
I enclose a criticism, a taste of the future—
REV. S. HAUGHTON'S ADDRESS TO THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, DUBLIN. (February 9, 1859.)
"This speculation of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace would not be worthy of notice were it not for the weight of authority of the names (i.e. Lyell's and yours), under whose auspices it has been brought forward. If it means what it says, it is a truism; if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact."
Q.E.D.
CHARLES DARWIN TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, May 11th [1859].
My dear Hooker,
Thank you for telling me about obscurity of style. But on my life no nigger with lash over him could have worked harder at clearness than I have done. But the very difficulty to me, of itself leads to the probability that I fail. Yet one lady who has read all my MS. has found only two or three obscure sentences, but Mrs. Hooker having so found it, makes me tremble. I will do my best in proofs. You are a good man to take the trouble to write about it.
With respect to our mutual muddle ("When I go over the chapter I will see what I can do, but I hardly know how I am obscure, and I think we are somehow in a mutual muddle with respect to each other, from starting from some fundamentally different notions."—Letter of May 6, 1859.), I never for a moment thought we could not make our ideas clear to each other by talk, or if either of us had time to write in extenso.
I imagine from some expressions (but if you ask me what, I could not answer) that you look at variability as some necessary contingency with organisms, and further that there is some necessary tendency in the variability to go on diverging in character or degree. IF YOU DO, I do not agree. "Reversion" again (a form of inheritance), I look at as in no way directly connected with Variation, though of course inheritance is of fundamental importance to us, for if a variation be not inherited, it is of no significance to us. It was on such points as these I FANCIED that we perhaps started differently.