i870 PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 351 



As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture 

 says that " a living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a 

 Hving dog. By the way I bought Cotta's edition of him the 

 other day, and there he stands on my bookcase in all the glory of 

 gilt, black, and marble edges. Do you know I did a version of his 

 Aphorisms on Nature into English the other day.* It astonishes 

 the British Philistines not a little. When they began to read it 

 they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly gone mad ! 



But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received 

 your volume on the Arthropods the other day, but I shall not be 

 able to look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of 

 my lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geo- 

 logical Society on the i8th February, when, I am happy to say, 

 my tenure of office as President expires. 



After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings 

 and, as always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest in- 

 terest. But I wish you would not take it into your head that 

 Darwin or I, or anyone else thinks otherwise than highly of 

 you, or that you need " re-establishing " in any one's eyes. But 

 I hope you will not have finished your work before the autumn, 

 as they have made me President of the British Association this 

 year, and I shall be very busy with my address in the summer. 

 The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on the 14th September, 

 and I live in hope that you will be able to come over. Let me 

 know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters. 



I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half sheet. But for 

 Heaven's sake don't be angry with me in English again. It's 

 far worse than a scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little for- 

 gotten my German as I have my German friends. 



On February 18 he delivered his farewell address f to the 

 Geological Society, on laying down the office of President. 

 He took the opportunity to revise his address to the society 

 in 1862, and pointed out the growth of evidence in favour 

 of the evolution theory, and in particular traced the paleon- 

 tological history of the horse, through a series of fossil types 

 approaching more and more to a generalised ungulate type 

 and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or collateral of 

 such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two other 

 toes which appertain to the average quadruped. 



* For the first number of JVa/ure, November i86g. 



f " Paleontology and the Doctrine of Evolution," Col/. £ss. viii. 



