-earned present, and
I feel assured, grand future success.

(417/2. Later in the year Mr. Darwin wrote: "I am delighted to hear that
you mean to work the comparative Psychology well. I thought your letter
to the "Times" very good indeed. (417/3. Romanes wrote to the "Times"
August 28th, 1878, expressing his views regarding the distinction
between man and the lower animals, in reply to criticisms contained in
a leading article in the "Times" of August 23rd on his lecture at the
Dublin meeting of the British Association.) Bartlett, at the Zoological
Gardens, I feel sure, would advise you infinitely better about
hardiness, intellect, price, etc., of monkey than F. Buckland; but with
him it must be viva voce.

"Frank says you ought to keep a idiot, a deaf mute, a monkey, and a baby
in your house.")

LETTER 418. TO G.A. GASKELL. Down, November 15th, 1878.

(418/1. This letter has been published in Clapperton's "Scientific
Meliorism," 1885, page 340, together with Mr. Gaskell's letter of
November 13th (page 337). Mr. Gaskell's laws are given in his letter of
November 13th, 1878. They are:--

I. The Organological Law:
Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

II. The Sociological Law:
Sympathetic Selection, or Indiscriminate Survival.

III. The Moral Law:
Social Selection, or the Birth of the Fittest.)

Your letter seems to me very interesting and clearly expressed, and I
hope that you are in the right. Your second law appears to be largely
acted on in all civilised countries, and I just alluded to it in my
remarks to the effect (as far as I remember) that the evil which would
follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak
and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and then
to procreate.

With regard to your third law, I do not know whether you have read an
article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes
certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be
matched. I have lately been led to reflect a little, (for, now that I
am growing old, my work has become [word indecipherable] special) on the
artificial checks, but doubt greatly whether such would be advantageous
to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant
future. Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last
two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a