Hotel de la Jungfrau, Aeggischhorn, July 18, 1862.

My dear Flower,

Many thanks for your letter.  I shall make my acknowledgments to the council in due form when I have read the official announcement on my return to England.  I trust they will not have occasion to repent declining Dr. —­’s offer.  At any rate I shall do my best.

I am particularly obliged to you for telling me about the Dijon bones.  Dijon lies quite in my way in returning to England, and I shall stop a day there for the purpose of making the acquaintance of M. Nodet and his Schizopleuron.  I have a sort of dim recollection that there are some other remains of extinct South American mammals in the Dijon Museum which I ought to see.

Your news about the lower jaw made me burst out into such an exclamation that all the salle-a-manger heard me!  I saw the fitness of the thing at once.  The foramen and the shape of the condyle ought to have suggested it at once.

I have had a very pleasant trip, passing through Grindelwald, the Aar valley, and the Rhone valley, as far as here; but, up to the day before yesterday, my health remained very unsatisfactory, and I was terribly teased by the neuralgia or rheumatism or whatever it is.

On that day, however, I had a very sharp climb involving a great deal of exertion and a most prodigious sweating, and on the next morning I really woke up a new man.  Yesterday I repeated the dose and I am in hopes now that I shall come back fit to grapple with all the work that lies before me.

Ever, my dear Flower, yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[This autumn he gladly took on what appeared to be an additional piece of work.  On October 12 he writes from 26 Abbey Place:—­]

I saw Flower yesterday, and I find that my present colleague in the Hunterian Professorship wishes to get rid of his share in the lectures, having, I suppose, at the eleventh hour discovered his incompetency.  It looks paradoxical to say so, but it will really be easier for me to give eighteen or twenty-four lectures than twelve, so that I have professed my readiness to take as much as he likes off his hands.

[This Professorship had been in existence for more than sixty years, for when the Museum of the famous anatomist John Hunter was entrusted to the College of Surgeons by the Government, the condition was made that “one course of lectures, not less than twenty-four in number, on comparative anatomy and other subjects, illustrated by the preparations, shall be given every year by some member of the company.”  Huxley arranged to publish from year to year the substance of his lectures on the vertebrates, “and by that process to bring out eventually a comprehensive, though condensed, systematic work on ’Comparative Anatomy’.” ("Comparative Anatomy” volume 1 Preface.)

Of the labour entailed in this course, the late Sir W.H.  Flower wrote:—­