One can express neither wish nor hope in such a case. With such a man what is will be well. All I have to repeat is, don't knock yourself up. I wish to God I could help you in some way or other beyond repeating the parrot cry. If I can, of course you will let me know.
[In June 1861 a jotting in his notebook records that he is at work on the chick's skull, part of the embryological work which he took up vigorously at this time, and at once the continuation of his researches on the Vertebrate Skull, embodied in his Croonian lecture of 1858, and the beginning of a long series of investigations into the structure of birds. There is a reference to this in a very interesting letter dealing chiefly with what he conceived to be the cardinal point of the Darwinian theory:—]
26 Abbey Place, September 4, 1861.
My dear Hooker,
Yesterday being the first day I went to the Athenaeum after reading your note, I had a look at, and a good laugh over, the "Quarterly" article. Who can be the writer?
I have been so busy studying chicken development, a difficult subject to which I had long ago made up my mind to devote my first spare time, that I have written you no word about your article in the "Gardener's Chronicle." I quite agree with the general tendency of your argument, though it seems to me that you put your view rather too strongly when you seem to question the position "that, as a rule, resemblances prevail over differences" between parent and offspring. Surely, as a rule, resemblances DO prevail over differences, though I quite agree with you that the latter have been far too much overlooked. The great desideratum for the species question at present seems to me to be the determination of the law of variation. Because no law has yet been made out, Darwin is obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous or a matter of chance, so that the bishops and superior clergy generally (the only real atheists and believers in chance left in the world) gird at him as if he were another Lucretius.
It is [in] the recognition of a tendency to variation apart from the variation of what are ordinarily understood as external conditions that Darwin's view is such an advance on Lamarck. Why does not somebody go to work experimentally, and get at the law of variation for some one species of plant?
What a capital article that was in the "Athenaeum" the other day apud the Schlagintweits. [The brothers Schlagintweit (four of whom were ultimately employed), who had gained some reputation for their work on the Physical Geography of the Alps, were, on Humboldt's recommendation, despatched by the East India Company in 1854-55-56 to the Deccan, and especially to the Himalayan region (where they were the first Europeans to cross the Kuenlun Mountains), in order to correlate the instruments and observations of the several magnetic surveys of India. But they enlarged the scope of their mission by professing to correct the great trigonometrical survey, while the contract with them was so loosely drawn up that they had practically a roving commission in science, to make researches and publish the results—up to nine volumes—in all manner of subjects, which in fact ranged from the surveying work to ethnology, and were crowned by an additional volume on Buddhism! The original cost to the Indian Government was estimated at 15 thousand pounds sterling; the allowances from the English Government during the inordinately prolonged period of arranging and publishing materials, including payment for sixty copies of each volume, atlas, and so forth, as well as personal payments, came to as much more.
Unfortunately the results were of less value than was expected. The attempt to correct the work done with the large instruments of the trigonometrical survey by means of far smaller instruments was absurd; away from the ground covered by the great survey the figures proved to be very inaccurate. The most annoying part of the affair was that it absorbed the State aid which might have been given to more valuable researches.
The Council of the Royal Society had been consulted as to the advisability of despatching this expedition and opposed it, for there were in the service of the Company not a few men admirably qualified for the duty, whose scientific services had received scant appreciation. Nevertheless, the expedition started after all, with the approval of Colonel Sabine, the president. In the last months of 1866, Huxley drew up for the Royal Society a report upon the scientific value of the results of the expedition.] Don Roderigo is very wroth at being made responsible with Sabine, and indeed I think he had little enough to do with it.