About the same time there is a letter acknowledging Mr. Bateson’s book “On Variation”, which is interesting as touching on the latter-day habit of speculation apart from fact which had begun to prevail in biology:—­]

Hodeslea, February 20, 1894.

My dear Mr. Bateson,

I have put off thanking you for the volume “On Variation” which you have been so good as to send me in the hope that I should be able to look into it before doing so.

But as I find that impossible, beyond a hasty glance, at present, I must content myself with saying how glad I am to see from that glance that we are getting back from the region of speculation into that of fact again.

There have been threatenings of late that the field of battle of Evolution was being transferred to Nephelococcygia.

I see you are inclined to advocate the possibility of considerable “saltus” on the part of Dame Nature in her variations.  I always took the same view, much to Mr. Darwin’s disgust, and we used often to debate it.

If you should come across my article in the “Westminster” (1860) you will find a paragraph on that question near the end.  I am writing to Macmillan to send you the volume.

Yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

By the way, have you ever considered this point, that the variations of which breeders avail themselves are exactly those which occur when the previously wild stocks are subjected to exactly the same conditions?

[The rest of the first half of the year is not eventful.  As illustrating the sort of communications which constantly came to him, I quote from a letter to Sir J. Donnelly, of January 11:—­]

I had a letter from a fellow yesterday morning who must be a lunatic, to the effect that he had been reading my essays, thought I was just the man to spend a month with, and was coming down by the five o’clock train, attended by his seven children and his mother-in-law!

Frost being over, there was lots of boiling water ready for him, but he did not turn up!

Wife and servants expected nothing less than assassination.

[Later he notes with dismay an invitation as a Privy Councillor to a State evening party:—­]

It is at 10.30 P.M., just the time this poor old septuagenarian goes to bed!

My swellness is an awful burden, for as it is I am going to dine with the Prime Minister on Saturday.

[The banquet with the Prime Minister here alluded to was the occasion of a brief note of apology to Lord Rosebery for having unintentionally kept him waiting:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 28, 1894.

Dear Lord Rosebery,

I had hoped that my difficulties in dealing with an overtight scabbard stud, as we sat down to dinner on Saturday had inconvenienced no one but myself, until it flashed across my mind after I had parted from you that, as you had observed them, it was only too probable that I had the misfortune to keep you waiting.