Let me see what has happened to me that will interest you since I last wrote.  Did I tell you that I have finally made up my mind to stop in London—­the Government having made it worth my while to continue in Jermyn Street?  They give me 600 pounds sterling a year now, with a gradual rise up to 800 pounds sterling, which I reckon as just enough to live on if one keeps very quiet.  However, it is the greatest possible blessing to be paid at last, and to be free from all the abominable anxieties which attend a fluctuating income.  I can tell you I have had a sufficiently hard fight of it.

When Nettie and I were young fools we agreed we would marry whenever we had 200 pounds sterling a year.  Well, we have had more than twice that to begin upon, and how it is we have kept out of the Bench is a mystery to me.  But we have, and I am inclined to think that the Missus has got a private hoard (out of the puddings) for Noel.

I shall leave Nettie to finish this rambling letter.  In the meanwhile, my best love to you and yours, and mind you are a better correspondent than your affectionate brother,

Tom.

[To Professor Leuckart.]

The Government School of Mines, Jermyn Street, London, January 30, 1859.

My dear Sir,

Our mutual friend, Dr. Harley, informs me that you have expressed a wish to become possessed of a separate copy of my lectures, published in the “Medical Times.”  I greatly regret that I have not one to send you.  The publisher only gave me half a dozen separate copies of the numbers of the journal in which the Lectures appeared.  Of these I sent one to Johannes Muller and one to Professor Victor Carus, and the rest went to other friends.

I am sorry to say that a mere fragment of what I originally intended to have published has appeared, the series having been concluded when I reached the end of the Crustacea.  To say truth, the Lectures were not fitted for the journal in which they appeared.

I did not know that anyone in Germany had noticed them until I received the copy of your “Bericht” for 1856, which you were kind enough to send me.  I owe you many thanks for the manner in which you speak of them, and I assure you it was a source of great pleasure and encouragement to me to find so competent a judge as yourself appreciating and sympathising with my objects.

Particular branches of zoology have been cultivated in this country with great success, as you are well aware, but ten years ago I do not believe that there were half a dozen of my countrymen who had the slightest comprehension of morphology, and of what you and I should call “Wissenschaftliche Zoologie.”

Those who thought about the matter at all took Owen’s osteological extravaganzas for the ne plus ultra of morphological speculation.