I am every day becoming more and more certain that you were on the right track thirty years ago in your views of the order and symmetry to be traced in the true natural system.

During the next session I mean to send in a paper to the Royal Society upon the “Homologies of the Mollusca,” which shall astonish them.  I want to get done for the Mollusca what Savigny did for the Articulata, namely to show how they all—­Cephalopoda, Gasteropoda, Pteropoda, Heteropoda, etc.—­are organised in each.  What with this and the book, I shall have enough to do for the next six months.

You will doubtless ask what is the practical outlook of all this? whether it leads anywhere in the direction of bread and cheese?  To this also I can give a tolerably satisfactory answer.

As you won’t have a Professor of Natural History at Sydney—­to my great sorrow—­I have gone in as a candidate for a Professorial chair at the other end of the world, Toronto in Canada.  In England there is nothing to be done—­it is the most hopeless prospect I know of; of course the Service offers nothing for me except irretrievable waste of time, and the scientific appointments are so few and so poor that they are not tempting...

Had the Sydney University been carried out as originally proposed, I should certainly have become a candidate for the Natural History Chair.  I know no finer field for exertion for any naturalist than Sydney Harbour itself.  Should such a Professorship be hereafter established, I trust you will jog the memory of my Australian friends in my behalf.  I have finally decided that my vocation is science, and I have made up my mind to the comparative poverty which is its necessary adjunct, and to the no less certain seclusion from the ordinary pleasures and rewards of men.  I say this without the slightest idea that there is anything to be enthusiastic about in either science or its professors.  A year behind the scenes is quite enough to disabuse one of all rose-pink illusions.

But it is equally clear to me that for a man of my temperament, at any rate, the sole secret of getting through this life with anything like contentment is to have full scope for the development of one’s faculties.  Science alone seems to me to afford this scope—­Law, Divinity, Physic, and Politics being in a state of chaotic vibration between utter humbug and utter scepticism.

There is a great stir in the scientific world at present about who is to occupy Konig’s place at the British Museum, and whether the whole establishment had better not, quoad Zoology, be remodelled and placed under Owen’s superintendence.  The heart-burnings and jealousies about this matter are beyond all conception.  Owen is both feared and hated, and it is predicted that if Gray and he come to be officers of the same institution, in a year or two the total result will be a caudal vertebra of each remaining after the manner of the Kilkenny cats.