Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.

Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.

It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.

In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.

We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.