Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has
been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticised, and even
when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been
my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that "I have
worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than
this." I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Terra del Fuego, thinking
(and I believe that I wrote home to that effect) that I could not employ
my life better than in adding a little to natural science. This I have
done to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like,
but they cannot destroy this conviction.
During the last two months of 1859 I was fully occupied in preparing a
second edition of the _Origin_, and by an enormous correspondence. On
January 1, 1860, I began arranging my notes for my work on the
_Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,_ but it was not
published until the beginning of 1868, the delay having been caused
partly by frequent periods of illness, one of which lasted seven months,
and partly by being tempted to publish on other subjects which at the
time interested me more.
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