1867 LETTER TO HAECKEL 415 



without waiting to be personally attacked ; once 

 where he found his opponent was engaged in a flank- 

 ing movement; the other when a man of great 

 public reputation had come forward to champion an 

 untenable position of the older orthodoxy, and a 

 blow dealt to his pretensions to historical and 

 scientific accuracy would not only bring the question 

 home to many who neglected it in an impersonal 

 form, but would also react upon the value of the 

 historical arguments with which he sought to stir 

 public opinion in other spheres. The other letter 

 touches on the influence, at once calming and in- 

 vigorating, as he had known it to the full for the last 

 twelve years, which a wife can bring in the midst of 

 outward struggles to the inner life of the home. 



JERMYN STREET, LONDON, May 20, 1867. 



MY DEAR HAECKEL Your letter, though dated the 

 12th, has but just reached me. I mention this lest you 

 should think me remiss, my sin in not writing to you 

 already being sufficiently great. But your book did not 

 reach me until November, and I have been hard at work 

 lecturing, with scarcely an intermission ever since 



Now I need hardly say that the Morphologic is not 

 exactly a novel to be taken up and read in the intervals 

 of business. On the contrary, though profoundly interest- 

 ing, it is an uncommonly hard book, and one wants to 

 read every sentence of it over. 



I went through it within a fortnight of its coming 

 into iny hands, so as to get at your general drift and 

 purpose, but up to this time I have not been able to 

 read it as 1 feel I ought to read it before venturing upon 

 criticism. You cannot imagine how my time is frittered 

 away in these accursed lectures and examinations. 



