104 EVOLUTION [CHAP. II 



Letter 58 have always suspected Agassiz of superficiality and wretched 

 reasoning powers ; but I think such men do immense good in 

 their way. Sec how he stirred up all Europe about glaciers. 

 By the way, Lyell has been at the glaciers, or rather their 

 effects, and seems to have done good work in testing and 

 judging what others have done. . . . 



In regard to classification and all the endless disputes 

 about the " Natural System," which no two authors define in 

 the same way, I believe it ought, in accordance to my hetero- 

 dox notions, to be simply genealogical. But as we have no 

 written pedigrees you will, perhaps, say this will not help 

 much ; but I think it ultimately will, whenever heterodoxy 

 becomes orthodoxy, for it will clear away an immense amount 

 of rubbish about the value of characters, and will make the 

 difference between analogy and homology clear. The time 

 will come, I believe, though I shall not live to see it, when we 

 shall have very fairly true genealogical trees of each great 

 kingdom of Nature. 



Letter 59 To T. H. Huxley. 



Down, Dec. i6th [1857]. 



In my opinion your Catalogue 1 is simply the very best 

 rhume, by far, on the whole science of Natural History, which 

 I have ever seen. I really have no criticisms : I agree with 

 every word. Your metaphors and explanations strike me 

 as admirable. In many parts it is curious how what you 

 have written agrees with what I have been writing, only with 

 the melancholy difference for me that you put everything in 

 twice as striking a manner as I do. I append, more for the 

 sake of showing that I have attended to the whole than for 

 any other object, a few most trivial criticisms. 



I was amused to meet with some of the arguments, which 

 you advanced in talk with me, on classification ; and it 

 pleases me, [that] my long proses were so far not thrown 

 away, as they led you to bring out here some good sentences. 



1 It appears from a letter to Sir J. D. Hooker (Dec. 25th, 1857) that 

 the reference is to the proofs of Huxley's Explanatory Preface to the 

 Catalogue of the Palceontological Collection in the Museum of Practical 

 Geology , by T. H. Huxley and R. Etheridge, 1865. Mr. Huxley appends 

 a note at p. xlix : " It should be noted that these pages were written 

 before the appearance of Mr. Darwin's book on The Origin of Species 

 a work which has effected a revolution in biological speculation." 



