I have had another talk with Bentham, who is greatly agitated by your
book: evidently the stern, keen intellect is aroused, and he finds that
it is too late to halt between two opinions. How it will go we shall
see. I am intensely interested in what we shall come to, and never
broach the subject to him. I finished the geological evidence chapters
yesterday; they are very fine and very striking, but I cannot see they
are such forcible objections as you still hold them to be. I would say
that you still in your secret soul underrate the imperfection of the
Geological Record, though no language can be stronger or arguments
fairer and sounder against it. Of course I am influenced by Botany, and
the conviction that we have not in a fossilised condition a fraction of
the plants that have existed, and that not a fraction of those we have
are recognisable specifically. I never saw so clearly put the fact that
it is not intermediates between existing species we want, but between
these and the unknown tertium quid.

You certainly make a hobby of Natural Selection, and probably ride it
too hard; that is a necessity of your case. If the improvement of
the creation-by-variation doctrine is conceivable, it will be by
unburthening your theory of Natural Selection, which at first sight
seems overstrained--i.e., to account for too much. I think, too, that
some of your difficulties which you override by Natural Selection may
give way before other explanations. But, oh Lord! how little we do
know and have known to be so advanced in knowledge by one theory. If we
thought ourselves knowing dogs before you revealed Natural Selection,
what d--d ignorant ones we must surely be now we do know that law.

I hear you may be at the Club on Thursday. I hope so. Huxley will not be
there, so do not come on that ground.

LETTER 89. TO T.H. HUXLEY. January 1st [1860].

I write one line merely to thank you for your pleasant note, and to say
that I will keep your secret. I will shake my head as mysteriously
as Lord Burleigh. Several persons have asked me who wrote that "most
remarkable article" in the "Times." (89/1. The "Times," December 26th,
1859, page 8. The opening paragraphs were by one of the staff of
the "Times." See "Life and Letters," II., page 255, for Mr. Huxley's
interesting account of his share in the matter.) As a cat may look at a
king, so I have said that I strongly suspected you. X was so sharp that
the first sentence revealed the au