My dear Farrer,

I shall be delighted to take a dive into the unfathomable depths of official folly; but your promised document has not reached me.

Your astonishment at the tenacity of life of fallacies, permit me to say, is shockingly unphysiological.  They, like other low organisms, are independent of brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are smitten on the place where the brains ought to be—­I don’t know B., but I am convinced that A. has nothing but a spinal cord, devoid of any cerebral development.  Would Mr. Cross give him up for purposes of experiment?  Lingen and you might perhaps be got to join in a memorial to that effect.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[A fresh chapter of research, the results of which he now began to give to the public, was the history of the Dog.  On April 6 and 13 he lectured at the Royal Institution “On Dogs and the Problems connected with them”—­their relation to other animals, and the problem of the origin of the domestic dog, and the dog-like animals in general.  As so often before, these lectures were the outcome of the careful preparation of a course of instruction for his students.  The dog had been selected as one of the types of mammalian structure upon which laboratory work was to be done.  Huxley’s own dissections had led him on to a complete survey of the genus, both wild and domestic.  As he writes to Darwin on May 10:—­]

I wish it were not such a long story that I could tell you all about the dogs.  They will make out such a case for “Darwinismus” as never was.  From the South American dogs at the bottom (C. vetulus, cancrivorus, etc.) to the wolves at the top, there is a regular gradual progression the range of variation of each “species” overlapping the ranges of those below and above.  Moreover, as to the domestic dogs, I think I can prove that the small dogs are modified jackals, and the big dogs ditto wolves.  I have been getting capital material from India, and working the whole affair out on the basis of measurements of skulls and teeth.

However, my paper for the Zoological Society is finished, and I hope soon to send you a copy of it...

[Unfortunately he never found time to complete his work for final publication in book form, and the rough, unfinished notes are all that remain of his work, beyond two monographs “On the Epipubis in the Dog and Fox” ("Proceedings of the Royal Society” 30 162-63), and “On the Cranial and Dental Characters of the Canidae” ("Proceedings of the Zoological Society” 1880 pages 238-288).

The following letters deal with the collection of specimens for examination:—­]

4 Marlborough Place, January 17, 1880.

My dear Flower,

I happened to get hold of two foxes this week—­a fine dog fox and his vixen wife; and among other things, I have been looking up Cowper’s glands, the supposed absence of which in the dogs has always “gone agin’ me.”  Moreover, I have found them (or their representatives) in the shape of two small sacs, which open by conspicuous apertures into the urethra immediately behind the bulb.  If your Icticyon was a male, I commend this point to your notice.