On July 6 he writes to tell Darwin that he has lodged a memorial of his about the fossils at the Gallegos river, which was to be visited by the "Nassau" [Chapter 22] exploring ship, with the hydrographer direct, instead of sending it in to the Lords of the Admiralty, who would only have sent it on to the hydrographer. This letter he heads "Country orders executed with accuracy and despatch."
The following letter to Charles Kingsley explains itself:—]
Jermyn Street, April 12, 1866.
My dear Kingsley,
I shall certainly do myself the pleasure of listening to you when you preach at the Royal Institution. I wonder if you are going to take the line of showing up the superstitions of men of science. Their name is legion, and the exploit would be a telling one. I would do it myself only I think I am already sufficiently isolated and unpopular.
However, whatever you are going to do I am sure you will speak honestly and well, and I shall come and be assistant bottleholder.
I am glad you like the working men's lectures. I suspect they are about the best things of that line that I have done, and I only wish I had had the sense to anticipate the run they have had here and abroad, and I would have revised them properly.
As they stand they are terribly in the rough, from a literary point of view.
No doubt crib-biting, nurse-biting and original sin in general are all strictly reducible from Darwinian principles; but don't by misadventure run against any academical facts.
Some whales have all the cerebral vertebrae free NOW, and every one of them has the full number, seven, whether they are free or fixed. No doubt whales had hind legs once upon a time. If when you come up to town you go to the College of Surgeons, my friend Flower the Conservator (a good man whom you should know), will show you the whalebone whale's thigh bones in the grand skeleton they have recently set up. The legs, to be sure, and the feet are gone, the battle of life having left private Cetacea in the condition of a Chelsea pensioner.