l867 LETTER TO HAECKEL 



311 



July 16, 1867. 



My dear Haeckel — My wife and I send you our most 

 hearty congratulations and good wishes. Give your betrothed 

 a good account of us, for we hope in the future to entertain as 

 warm a friendship for her as for you. I was very glad to have 

 the news, for it seemed to me very sad that a man of your warm 

 affections should be surrounded only by hopeless regrets. Such 

 surroundings inflict a sort of partial paralysis upon one's whole 

 nature, a result which is, to me, far more serious and regrettable 

 than the mere suffering one undergoes. 



The one thing for men, who like you and I stand pretty much 

 alone, and have a good deal of fighting to do in the external 

 world, is to have light and warmth and confidence within the 

 four walls of home. May all these good things await you ! 



Many thanks for your kind invitation to Jena. I am sure 

 my wife would be as much pleased as I to accept it, but it is 

 very difficult for her to leave her children. 



We will keep it before us as a pleasant possibility, but I 

 suspect you and Madame will be able to come to England before 

 we shall reach Germany. 



I wish I had rooms to offer you, but you have seen that troop 

 of children, and they leave no corner unoccupied. 



Many thanks for the Bericht and the genealogical tables. 

 You seem, as usual, to have got through an immense amount of 

 work. 



I have been exceedingly occupied with a paper on the 

 " Classification of Birds," a sort of expansion of one of my 

 Hunterian Lectures this year. It has now gone to press, and 

 I hope soon to be able to send you a copy of it. 



Occupation of this and other kinds must be my excuse for 

 having allowed so much longer a time to slip by than I imagined 

 had done before writing to you. It is not for want of sym- 

 pathy, be sure, for my wife and I have often talked of the new 

 life opening out to you. 



This is written in my best hand. I am proud of it, as I can 

 read every word quite easily myself, which is more than I can 

 always say for my own MS. — Ever yours faithfully, 



T. H. Huxley. 



The same experience is attested and enforced in the 



correspondence with Dr. Anton Dohrn, which begins this 



year. Genial, enthusiastic, as pungent as he was eager in 



conversation, the future founder of the Marine Biological 



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