ess appear the more beautiful. Mere physical beauty--i.e. a
healthy and regular development of the body and features approaching to
the mean and type of European man, I believe is quite as frequent in one
class of society as the other, and much more frequent in rural districts
than in cities.

With regard to the rank of man in zoological classification, I fear I
have not made myself intelligible. I never meant to adopt Owen's or any
other such views, but only to point out that from one point of view he
was right. I hold that a distinct family for Man, as Huxley allows, is
all that can possibly be given him zoologically. But at the same time,
if my theory is true, that while the animals which surrounded him have
been undergoing modification in all parts of their bodies to a generic
or even family degree of difference, he has been changing almost wholly
in the brain and head--then in geological antiquity the SPECIES man may
be as old as many mammalian families, and the origin of the FAMILY man
may date back to a period when some of the ORDERS first originated.

As to the theory of Natural Selection itself, I shall always maintain it
to be actually yours and yours only. You had worked it out in details I
had never thought of, years before I had a ray of light on the subject,
and my paper would never have convinced anybody or been noticed as more
than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionised the
study of Natural History, and carried away captive the best men of
the present age. All the merit I claim is the having been the means of
inducing you to write and publish at once. I may possibly some day go a
little more into this subject (of Man), and if I do will accept the kind
offer of your notes.

I am now, however, beginning to write the "Narrative of my Travels,"
which will occupy me a long time, as I hate writing narrative, and after
Bates' brilliant success rather fear to fail.

I shall introduce a few chapters on Geographical Distribution and other
such topics. Sir C. Lyell, while agreeing with my main argument on Man,
thinks I am wrong in wanting to put him back into Miocene times, and
thinks I do not appreciate the immense interval even to the later
Pliocene. But I still maintain my view, which in fact is a logical
result of my theory; for if man originated in later Pliocene, when
almost all mammalia were of closely allied species to those now living,
and many even identical, then man has not be