tion of our domestic productions, together with the causes and laws of variation, inheritance, and the intercrossing of plants, are the sole subjects which I have been able to write about in full, so as to use all the materials which I have collected. The Descent of Man took me three years to write, but then as usual some of this time was lost by ill health, and some was consumed by preparing new editions and other minor works.
The Descent of Man created an even greater popular stir than did the Origin. The large first edition was quickly sold out; and discussion and ridicule of the book became the fashionable recreation for those who had read arts of it as well as those who had not. The comic paper Punch acted as a mirror of current opinion, which in the main was adverse. One of the Darwin ballads[1] calls to mind more recent things of the same sort in connection with the discovery of great fossil animals in our own country:
They slept in a wood,
Or wherever they could
For they didn’t know how to make beds;
They hadn’t got huts,
They dined upon nuts,
Which they cracked upon each other’s heads.
They hadn’t much scope
For a comb, brush, or soap,
Or towels, or kettle, or fire;
They had no coats nor capes,
For ne'er did these apes
Invent what they didn’t require.
*****
From these though descended,
Our manners are mended.
Though still we can grin and backbite;
We cut up each other,
Be he friend or brother,
- ↑ Quoted by Bettany, Life of Darwin, p. 124.
