However, I have been toiling at a tremendously scientific article about the "Aryan question" absolutely devoid of blasphemy. [This article appeared in the November number of the "Nineteenth Century" ("Collected Essays" 7 271) and treats the question from a biological point of view, with the warning to readers that it is essentially a speculation based upon facts, but not assuredly proved. It starts from the racial characteristics of skull and stature, not from simply philological considerations, and arrives at a form of the "Sarmatian" theory of Aryan origins. And for fear lest he should be supposed to take sides in the question of race and language, or race and civilisation, he remarks:--] The combination of swarthiness with stature above the average and a long skull, confer upon me the serene impartiality of a mongrel. The Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, August 12, 1890. My dear Evans, I have read your address returned herewith with a great deal of interest, as I happen to have been amusing myself lately with reviewing the "Aryan" question according to the new lights (or darknesses). I have only two or three remarks to offer on the places I have marked A and B. As to A, I would not state the case so strongly against the probabilities of finding pliocene man. A pliocene Homo skeleton might analogically be expected to differ no more from that of modern men than the Oeningen Canis from modern Canes, or pliocene horses from modern horses. If so, he would most undoubtedly be a man--genus Homo--even if you made him a distinct species. For my part I should by no means be astonished to find the genus Homo represented in the Miocene, say the Neanderthal man with rather smaller brain capacity, longer arms and more movable great toe, but at most specifically different. As to B, I rather think there were people who fought the fallacy of language being a test of race before Broca--among them thy servant--who got into considerable hot water on that subject for a lecture on the forefathers and forerunners of the English people, delivered in 1870. Taylor says that Cuno was the first to insist upon the proposition that race is not co-extensive with language in 1871. That is all stuff. The same thesis had been maintained before I took it up, but I cannot remember by whom. [Cp. letter to Max Muller of June 15, 1865 volume 1.] Won't you refer to the Blackmore Museum? I was very much struck with it when at Salisbury the other day. Hope they gave you a better lunch at Gloucester than we did here. We'll treat you better next time in our own den. With the wife's kindest regards. Ever yours very faithfully, T.H. Huxley. [The remark in a preceding letter about "Gladstone, Gore, and Co." turned out to be prophetic as well as retrospective. Mr. Gladstone published this autumn in "Good Words" his "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," containing an attack upon Huxley's position as taken up in their previous controversy of 1889.