484 ON SPECIES 
groaning and growling and making an awful ado about 
my Introd. Essay to V. D. L. Flora, which is a heretical, 
hj^pothetical, clumsy, laboured, cumbrous rigmarole of what 
I believe to be the correct ideas not yet fully developed, 
owing to backward state of science. , 
To George Bentham 
Kcw : July 17, 1859. 
The Introd. Essay goes on very slowly indeed, many 
thanks for your valuable hints, I have modified some of my 
expressions (which conveyed more than I intended) acconl- 
ingly. On two points you and Gray are rather hard. 
You expect me to pwe or make out my case, and Gray 
calls me hasty, precipitate, etc. Now my case is no more 
capable of proof than the opposite doctrine of separate 
creations, and I do not pretend to be able. I think I show 
better cause for its probability than creationists can for 
theirs, but this a matter of opinion : at any rate the 
doctrine is conceivable and there is an immense deal in 
all the steps that lead to it ; whereas all the avenues to 
further research are blocked by the opposite. On this point 
and on Gray's objection I have said a few words in the con- 
cluding paragraphs which you have not yet seen. Thw^aites 
has written to me on the subject evidently on Thomson's 
suggestion, for Thwaites w^as once a devoted variationist 
and I suppose is so still, though he writes cautioning me 
not to commit myself. One of your arguments against is 
favom-able to me, if logically pursued, viz. that as to the 
age of man being illimitable, and yet never exceeding a 
certain amount, viz. 1-200 years. Were then Methusaleh 
and his contemporaries different species ? Then again as 
regards Camelopard and shorter legged animals of its tribe 
• — their difference in that respect is not so great as between 
a Skye terrier and Greyhound. After all the case is quite 
analogous to the Science of Geology ; Lyell's views of 
uniformity of action and immense periods were laughed at 
by those born and* bred to the doctrine of successive cata- 
clysms in a world only 6000 years old, and I cannot help 
feehng that the difficulty in this case of species is to conceive 
time enough ; that however is not an impossibihty, but that 
of special creations of highly organised beings is an impossible 
