e has clearly, as he admits,
influenced him. He admits to a certain extent Natural Selection, yet I
am sure does not understand me. It is strange that very few do, and I
am become quite convinced that I must be an extremely bad explainer. To
recur for a moment to Owen: he grossly misrepresents and is very unfair
to Huxley. You say that you think the article must be by a pupil of
Owen; but no one fact tells so strongly against Owen, considering his
former position at the College of Surgeons, as that he has never reared
one pupil or follower. In the number just out of "Fraser's Magazine"
(104/2. See "Life and Letters," II., page 314.) there is an article or
review on Lamarck and me by W. Hopkins, the mathematician, who, like
Haughton, despises the reasoning power of all naturalists. Personally he
is extremely kind towards me; but he evidently in the following number
means to blow me into atoms. He does not in the least appreciate the
difference in my views and Lamarck's, as explaining adaptation, the
principle of divergence, the increase of dominant groups, and the almost
necessary extinction of the less dominant and smaller groups, etc.

LETTER 105. TO C. LYELL. Down, June 17th [1860].

One word more upon the Deification (105/1. "If we confound 'Variation'
or 'Natural Selection' with such creational laws, we deify secondary
causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence" (Lyell, "The
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories
on the Origin of Species by Variation," page 469, London, 1863). See
Letter 131.) of Natural Selection: attributing so much weight to it
does not exclude still more general laws, i.e. the ordering of the whole
universe. I have said that Natural Selection is to the structure of
organised beings what the human architect is to a building. The very
existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general
laws; but no one, in giving credit for a building to the human
architect, thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has
appeared.

No astronomer, in showing how the movements of planets are due to
gravity, thinks it necessary to say that the law of gravity was designed
that the planets should pursue the courses which they pursue. I cannot
believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in the
construction of each species than in the course of the planets. It
is only owing to Paley and Co., I believe, that this more special
interfer