And on January 25, 1862:—­]

I have been skull-measuring all day at the College of Surgeons.  The Neanderthal skull may be described as a slightly exaggerated modification of one of the two types (and the lower) of Australian skulls.

After the fashion of accounting for the elephant of old, I suppose it will be said that it was imported.  But luckily the differences, though only of degree, are rather too marked for this hypothesis.

I only wish I had a clear six months to work at the subject.  Little did I dream what the undertaking to arrange your three woodcuts would lead to.  It will come in the long-run, I believe, to a new ethnological method, new modes of measurement, a new datum line, and new methods of registration.

If one had but two heads and neither required sleep!

[One immediate result of his investigations, which appeared in a lecture at the Royal Institution (February 7, 1862), “On the Fossil Remains of Man,” was incorporated in “Man’s Place in Nature.”  But a more important consequence of this impulse was that he went seriously into the study of Ethnology.  Of his work in this branch of natural science, Professor Virchow, speaking at the dinner given him by the English medical profession on October 5, 1898, declared that in the eyes of German savants it alone would suffice to secure immortal reverence for his name.

The concluding stage in the long controversy raised first at Oxford, was the British Association meeting at Cambridge in 1862.  It was here that Professor (afterwards Sir W.H.) Flower made his public demonstration of the existence in apes of the cerebral characters said to be peculiar to man.

From the 1st to the 9th of October Huxley stayed at Cambridge as the guest of Professor Fawcett at Trinity Hall, running over to Felixstow on the 5th to see his wife, whose health did not allow her to accompany him.

As President of Section D he had a good deal to do, and he describes the course of events in a letter to Darwin:—­]

26 Abbey Place, October 9, 1862.

My dear Darwin,

It is a source of sincere pleasure to me to learn that anything I can say or do is a pleasure to you, and I was therefore very glad to get your letter at that whirligig of an association meeting the other day.  We all missed you, but I think it was as well you did not come, for though I am pretty tough, as you know, I found the pace rather killing.  Nothing could exceed the hospitality and kindness of the University people—­and that, together with a great deal of speaking on the top of a very bad cold, which I contrived to catch just before going down, has somewhat used me up.

Owen came down with the obvious intention of attacking me on all points.  Each of his papers was an attack, and he went so far as to offer stupid and unnecessary opposition to proposals of mine in my own committee.  However, he got himself sold at all points...The Polypterus paper and the Aye-Aye paper fell flat.  The latter was meant to raise a discussion on your views, but it was all a stale hash, and I only made some half sarcastic remarks which stopped any further attempts at discussion...