[To Professor Haeckel.]
January 21, 1868.
Don't you think we did a right thing in awarding the Copley Medal to Baer last year? The old man was much pleased, and it was a comfort to me to think that we had not let him go to his grave without the highest honour we had to bestow.
I am over head and ears, as we say, in work, lecturing, giving addresses to the working men and (figurez vous!) to the clergy. [On December 12, 1867, there was a meeting of clergy at Sion House, under the auspices of Dean Farrar and the Reverend W. Rogers of Bishopsgate, when the bearing of recent science upon orthodox dogma was discussed. First Huxley delivered an address; some of the clergy present denounced any concessions as impossible; others declared that they had long ago accepted the teachings of geology; whereupon a candid friend inquired, "Then why don't you say so from your pulpits?" (See "Collected Essays" 3 119.)]
In scientific work the main thing just now about which I am engaged is a revision of the Dinosauria, with an eye to the "Descendenz Theorie." The road from Reptiles to Birds is by way of Dinosauria to the Ratitae. The bird "phylum" was struthious, and wings grew out of rudimentary forelimbs.
You see that among other things I have been reading Ernst Haeckel's
"Morphologie."
[The next two letters reflect his views on the proper work to be undertaken by men of unusual scientific capacity:—]
Jermyn Street, January 15, 1868.
My dear Dohrn,
Though the most procrastinating correspondent in existence when a letter does not absolutely require an answer, I am tolerably well-behaved when something needs to be said or done immediately. And as that appears to me to be the case with your letter of the 13th which has this moment reached me, I lose no time in replying to it.