It is a year to-day since the old “Rattlesnake” was paid off, and that reminds me among other things that I have hardly kept my promise of giving you information now and then upon the state of matters scientific in England.  My last letter is, I am afraid, nine or ten months old, but here in England the fighting and scratching to keep your place in the crowd exclude almost all other thoughts.  When I last wrote I was but at the edge of the crush at the pit-door of this great fools’ theatre—­now I have worked my way into it and through it, and am, I hope, not far from the check-takers.  I have learnt a good deal in my passage.

[Follows an account of his efforts to get his papers published—­substantially a repetition of what has already been given.]

Rumours there are scattered abroad of a favourable cast, and I am told on all hands that something will certainly be done.  I only asked for 300 pounds sterling, something less than the cost of a parliamentary blue-book which nobody ever hears of.  They take care to obliterate any spark of gratitude that might perchance arise for what they do, by keeping one so long in suspense that the result becomes almost a matter of indifference.  Had I known they would keep me so long, I would have published my work as a series of papers in the “Philosophical Transactions.”

In the meanwhile I have not been idle, as I hope to show you by the various papers enclosed with this.  You will recollect that on the Salpae.  No one here knew anything about them, and I thought that all my results were absolutely new—­until, me miserum!  I found them in a little paper of Krohn’s in the “Annales des Sciences” for 1846, without any figures to draw anybody’s attention.

The memoir on the Medusae (which I sent to you) has, I hear, just escaped a high honour—­to wit, the Royal Medal.  The award has been made to Newport for his paper on “Impregnation.”  I had no idea that anything I had done was likely to have the slightest claim to such distinction, but I was informed yesterday by one of the Council that the balance hung pretty evenly, and was only decided by their thinking my memoir was too small and short.

I have been working in all things with a reference to wide views of zoological philosophy, and the report upon the Echinoderms is intended in common with the mem. on the Salpae to explain my views of Individuality among the lower animals—­views which I mean to illustrate still further and enunciate still more clearly in my book that is to be. [He lectured on this subject at the Royal Institution in 1852.] They have met with approval from Carpenter, as you will see by the last edition of his “Principles of Physiology,” and I think that Forbes and some others will be very likely eventually to come round to them, but everything that relates to abstract thought is at a low ebb among the mass of naturalists in this country.

In the paper upon “Thalassicolla,” and in that which I read before the British Association, as also in one upon the organisation of the Rotifera, which I am going to have published in the Microscopical Society’s “Transactions,” I have been driving in a series of wedges into Cuvier’s Radiata, and showing how selon moi they ought to be distributed.