From Leonard Jenyns   31 December 1859

My dear Henslow,

We wish you & yours a happy new year tho’ I hardly know whether you have any of your family with you at present besides Louisa. — Leonard, I suppose, is too far off to have joined your Xmas dinner party, & George too, much taken up with his new wife. — I have just finished Darwin’s book, & should very much like to know what you think of it when you have got through it yourself—. I am not at all indisposed to accept his theory in part, — tho’ perhaps he would say — if in part — how can you refuse to go the whole way with me upon the same reasoning. — I am no stickler for the multitudes of so-called species treated or adopted by so many naturalists of the present day, — & can imagine the Genera, & perhaps families, when perfectly natural, to have originated in a single stock; — but when I think of a Whale or an Elephant by the side of a little mouse & am told they have the same parentage, I stand aghast at the boldness of the assumption: still more if it is attempted to bring together in the same way, (only throwing their beginnings back to a far more remote period of time,) — the vertebrate, annulose, & other leading types of the animals of kingdom. — To this latter step, & still more to tracing all organised beings to one source there seems to me the objection that does not ly ie against the possibility of one a single class, such as birds, being all modified descendants of some form, viz that there are no connecting limbs, — no intermediate forms, or hardly any, either recent or fossil to be met with. — The existence of man too seems to me the great difficulty of all. I was beginning to think he had passed over this matter entirely, — till almost in the last page I find him saying that his theory “throws light on the origins of men & his history.” — This can only be a civil way of saying that my great, great, &c. &c. grandfather was an oran-outang. — Will this go down with the majority of readers, — do you not feel the dignity of your pedigree thereby impeached? — But soberly, — tho’ I am not one of those who generally mix up scripture & science, I cannot see what sense or meaning is to be attached to Gen. ii, v.7, & especially vs. 21 & 22, — respecting the origin of woman, — if the human species at least is not to be allowed to have had an independent creation, — but to have merely come into the world by ordinary descent from previously existing races of living beings, whatever these latter may be supposed to be! — Neither can I assent to the doctrine that man’s reasoning faculties, — & above all his moral sense, — could ever have been obtained from irrational progenitors, — by mere natural selection acting however gradually, & for whatever length of time that may be required. — This seems to me to be doing away altogether with the divine image, —w. ^h forms the insurmountable distinction between man & brutes.—

What severe cold we have had till lately & now what wet: even here, in my sheltered garden, the therm ^r was as low as 15 ^o. — Now we have a flood of water, & the bridge by w. ^h I cross the brook to my parish of Wooley carried away: — I shall have to make a round tomorrow morning to get to Church.

My wife joins me in kind love, & many good wishes, to Louisa & yourself. — We are both tolerable.

Your’s affect ^ly | L. Jenyns