My dear Darwin,

The inclosed article, which has been followed up by another more
violent, more scurrilously personal, and more foolish, will prove to you
that my labour has not been in vain, and that your views and mine are
likely to be better ventilated in Scotland than they have been.

I was quite uneasy at getting no attack from the "Witness," thinking I
must have overestimated the impression that I had made, and the
favourableness of the reception of what I said. But the raving of the
"Witness" is clear testimony that my notion was correct.

I shall send a short reply to the "Scotsman" for the purpose of further
advertising the question.

With regard to what are especially your doctrines, I spoke much more
favourably than I am reported to have done. I expressed no doubt as to
their ultimate establishment, but as I particularly wished not to be
misrepresented as an advocate trying to soften or explain away real
difficulties, I did not in speaking enter into the details of what is to
be said in diminishing the weight of the hybrid difficulty. All this
will be put fully when I print the Lecture.

The arguments put in your letter are those which I have urged to other
people--of the opposite side--over and over again. I have told my
students that I entertain no doubt that twenty years' experiments on
pigeons conducted by a skilled physiologist, instead of by a mere
breeder, would give us physiological species sterile inter se, from a
common stock (and in this, if I mistake not, I go further than you do
yourself), and I have told them that when these experiments have been