directed to them.  But then if, as in nature, when you turn your gaze to one of these objects in order to see it clearly, you cannot do so, this is a defect.  Again, I believe that we actually see in a good photograph better than in nature, because the best camera lenses are more perfectly adjusted than our eyes, and give objects at varying distances with better definition.  Thus in a picture we see at the same time near and distinct objects easily and clearly, which in reality we cannot do.  If we could do so, everyone must acknowledge that our vision would be so much the more perfect and our appreciation of the beauties of nature more intense and complete; and in so far as a good landscape painting gives us this power it is better than nature itself; and I think this may account for that excessive and entrancing beauty of a good landscape or of a good panorama.  You will think these ideas horribly heterodox, but if we all thought alike there would be nothing to write about and nothing to learn.  I quite agree with you, however, as to artists using both eyes to paint and to see their paintings, but I think you quite mistake the theory of looking through the “catalogue”; it is not because the picture can be seen better with one eye, but because its effect can be better seen when all lateral objects are hidden—­the catalogue does this.  A double tube would be better, but that cannot be extemporised so easily.  Have you ever tried a stereograph taken with the camera only the distance apart of the eyes?  That must give nature.  When the angle is greater the views in the stereoscope show us, not nature, but a perfect reduced model of nature seen nearer the eye.

It is curious that you should put Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites as opposed and representing binocular and monocular painting when Turner himself praises up the Pre-Raphaelites and calls Holman Hunt the greatest living painter!!...

Now for Mr. Darwin’s book.  You quite misunderstand Mr. D.’s statement in the preface and his sentiments.  I have, of course, been in correspondence with him since I first sent him my little essay.  His conduct has been most liberal and disinterested.  I think anyone who reads the Linnean Society papers and his book will see it.  I do back him up in his whole round of conclusions and look upon him as the Newton of Natural History.

You begin by criticising the title.  Now, though I consider the title admirable, I believe it is not Mr. Darwin’s but the Publisher’s, as you are no doubt aware that publishers will have a taking title, and authors must and do give way to them.  Mr. D. gave me a different title before the book came out.  Again, you misquote and misunderstand Huxley, who is a complete convert.  Prof.  Asa Gray and Dr. Hooker, the two first botanists of Europe and America, are converts.  And Lyell, the first geologist living, who has all his life written against such conclusions as Darwin arrives at, is a convert and is about to declare or already has declared his conversion—­a noble and almost unique example of a man yielding to conviction on a subject which he has taught as a master all his life, and confessing that he has all his life been wrong.