LETTER 58. TO T.H. HUXLEY. Down, September 26th [1857].

Thanks for your very pleasant note. It amuses me to see what a bug-bear I have made myself to you; when having written some very pungent and good sentence it must be very disagreeable to have my face rise up like an ugly ghost. (58/1. This probably refers to Darwin's wish to moderate a certain pugnacity in Huxley.) I have always suspected Agassiz of superficiality and wretched reasoning powers; but I think such men do immense good in their way. See 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 heterodox 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.