Ever yours, affectionately, CHARLES DARWIN.
[In September he wrote:—
"I have this minute finished reading your splendid but too short address. I cannot doubt that it will have been fully appreciated by the Geographers of York; if not, they are asses and fools.">[
CHARLES DARWIN TO JOHN LUBBOCK. Sunday evening [1881].
My dear L.,
Your address (Presidential Address at the York meeting of the British Association.) has made me think over what have been the great steps in Geology during the last fifty years, and there can be no harm in telling you my impression. But it is very odd that I cannot remember what you have said on Geology. I suppose that the classification of the Silurian and Cambrian formations must be considered the greatest or most important step; for I well remember when all these older rocks were called grau-wacke, and nobody dreamed of classing them; and now we have three azoic formations pretty well made out beneath the Cambrian! But the most striking step has been the discovery of the Glacial period: you are too young to remember the prodigious effect this produced about the year 1840 (?) on all our minds. Elie de Beaumont never believed in it to the day of his death! the study of the glacial deposits led to the study of the superficial drift, which was formerly NEVER STUDIED and called Diluvium, as I well remember. The study under the microscope of rock-sections is another not inconsiderable step. So again the making out of cleavage and the foliation of the metamorphic rocks. But I will not run on, having now eased my mind. Pray do not waste even one minute in acknowledging my horrid scrawls.
Ever yours, CH. DARWIN.
[The following extracts referring to the late Francis Maitland Balfour (Professor of Animal Morphology at Cambridge. He was born in 1851, and was killed, with his guide, on the Aiguille Blanche, near Courmayeur, in July, 1882.), show my father's estimate of his work and intellectual qualities, but they give merely an indication of his strong appreciation of Balfour's most lovable personal character:—
From a letter to Fritz Muller, January 5, 1882:—
"Your appreciation of Balfour's book ['Comparative Embryology'] has pleased me excessively, for though I could not properly judge of it, yet it seemed to me one of the most remarkable books which have been published for some considerable time. He is quite a young man, and if he keeps his health, will do splendid work... He has a fair fortune of his own, so that he can give up his whole time to Biology. He is very modest, and very pleasant, and often visits here and we like him very much."