"Studies in the Theory of Descent." By A.Weismann.Translated and Edited by Raphael Meldola; with a Prefatory Notice by C.Darwin and a Translator's Preface.

See Letter 291.) I am sorry in many ways, including the honour of England as a scientific country, that your translation has as yet sold badly.

Does the publisher or do you lose by it?
If the publisher, though I shall be sorry for him, yet it is in the way of business; but if you yourself lose by it, I earnestly beg you to allow me to subscribe a trifle, viz., ten guineas, towards the expense of this work, which you have undertaken on public grounds.
LETTER 311.

TO W.HORSFALL.Down, February 8th, 1882.
In the succession of the older Formations the species and genera of trilobites do change, and then they all die out.

To any one who believes that geologists know the dawn of life (i.e., formations contemporaneous with the first appearance of living creatures on the earth) no doubt the sudden appearance of perfect trilobites and other organisms in the oldest known life-bearing strata would be fatal to evolution.