'Thank heavens for the good sense of Mr. Owen.'

Darwin looked shamefaced. 'Let me be perfectly honest with you, FitzRoy. Writing this book feels like confessing to a murder. My wife and my family will be heartbroken. But I believe, I truly believe in my heart, that nature's works are blundering, low and horribly cruel, and that it is my duty to say so. The chief good any individual scientific man can do is to push his field forward, a few years in advance of his age. For me to reach conclusions, and not openly to avow those conclusions, is to retard my field. It is a matter of principle.'

He is desperate for recognition, realized FitzRoy, yet he fears the consequences - and rightly so.

He fixed his gaze upon Darwin. 'If your theories be true, then religion is a lie, human law is a mass of folly and a base injustice, morality is moonshine, our labours on behalf of the black people of the world are the works of madmen, and men and women are only better beasts. If you succeed, the Church shall be ruined and all moral safeguards shattered. You will give succour and credence to the Chartists who seek to overthrow our society. You will remove the very need for God.'

'Perhaps not. Perhaps the success of The Vestiges has opened the way for healthy intellectual debate. Some scientists are with me - Huxley and Hooker, to name two. Owen, I must tell you, will be against me: he believes that animals progress from one form to another only within basic species archetypes, as decreed by the will of God.'

'Thank heavens for the good sense of Mr. Owen.'

Harry Thompson, This Thing of Darkness