Dear Sir,

Allow me to return sincere thanks for receipt of a Copy of the ‘Origin’ by to-days’ post—to be henceforth ranked with the Lares & Penates. ¹

The difference between the tastes of cultivated man & that of savages & birds is not so great when we expand your remark on the modern feeling for scenery &c by tracing how gradually it has arisen²

(Cosmos vol II.)³ The Sublime & Beautiful of the heroic ages were accessory to Power & Love. De Quincy somewhere remarks that Shakespeare was the first English poet who has alluded to clouds per se & that in terms far removed from Shelley’s rapturous poem.⁴

What we call ugliness may sometimes be for an animals’ good as is its stench, repulsive to its enemies as perfume is attractive to its mate; witness the manner of frightening birds by horrid painted screens, depriving them almost of sense for a little (practised in Palestine), & then shooting or catching them.

Keats’s exquisite description of a venomous serpent:— “She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue, vermilion spotted, golden, green, & blue”⁵ &c shows that the idea of danger being eliminated as regards the describer something remains pleasing to the eye.

In very ancient Chinese sculpture their method of catching tigers with a box-trap & mirror is represented.

Again thanking you for the handsome present, | I am, Dear Sir, | Yours truly | Ja^s. Shaw

Ch. Darwin Esq^re.

P.S. I can so far verify your remarks on the colour of fruit being a guide to birds as I observed that blackbirds &c preyed quite as much on red geans in my garden as on the ripened black ones, whereas the coloured gooseberries suffered far more from them than even the ripe green ones.⁶

J.S.