176 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xii 



get no money from the Government, and in the meanwhile you 

 and Kolliker, Gegenbaur and Vogt, went to tlie shores of the 

 Mediterranean and made sad havoc with my novelties. Then 

 came occupations consequent on my appointment to the chair 

 I now hold; and it was only last autumn that I had leisure to 

 take up the subject again. 



However, the plates, which I hope you will see in a few 

 months have, with two exceptions, been engraved five years. 



Pray make my remembrances to Dr. Eckhard. I was sorry 

 not to have seen him again in London. — Ever, my dear Sir, very 

 faithfully yours, T. H. Huxley. 



Prof. Leuckart. 



At this time Sir J. Hooker was writing, as an introduc- 

 tion to his Flora of Tasmania, his essay on the Flora of 

 Australia, published in 1859 — a book which owed its form 

 to the influence of Darwin, and in return lent weighty sup- 

 port to evolutionary theory from the botanical side. He 

 sent his proofs for Huxley to read. 



14 Waverley Place, N.W., April 11, 1859. 



My dear Hooker — I have read your proofs with a great deal 

 of attention and interest. I was greatly struck with the sug- 

 gestions in the first page, and the exposure of the fallacy " that 

 cultivated forms recur to wild types if left alone" is new to me 

 and seems of vast importance. 



The argument brought forward in the note is very striking 

 and as simple as the egg of Columbus, when one sees it. I have 

 marked one or two passages which are not quite clear to 

 me. . . . 



I have been accused of writing papers composed of nothing 

 but heads of chapters, and I think you tend the same way. 

 Please take the trouble to make the two lines I have scored into 

 a paragraph, so that poor devils who are not quite so well up 

 in the subject as yourself may not have to rack their brains for 

 an hour to supply all the links of your chain of argument. . . . 



You see that I am in a carping humour, but the matter of 

 the essays seems to me to be so very valuable that I am jealous 

 of the manner of it. 



I had a long visit from Greene of Cork yesterday. He is 

 very Irish, but very intelligent and well-informed, and I am in 

 hopes he will do good service. He is writing a little book on 

 the Protozoa, which (so far as I have glanced over the proof 



