Dohrn is away getting subsidies in Germany for his new ship.  We inspected the Aquarium this morning.  Eisig and Mayer are in charge.  Madame is a good deal altered in the course of the twelve years that have elapsed since I saw her, but says she is much better than she was.

As for myself, I got very much better when in North Italy in spite of the piercing cold.  But the fatigue of the journey from Ancona here, and the worry at the end of it, did me no good, and I have been seedy for a day or two.  However, I am picking up.

I see one has to be very careful here.  We had a lovely drive yesterday out Pausilippo, but the wife got chilled and was shaky this morning.  However, we got very good news of our daughter this evening, and that has set us both up.

My blessing for to-morrow will reach you after date.  Let us hear how everything went off.

Your return in May project is really impracticable on account of the Fishery Report.  I cannot be so long absent from the Home Office whatever I might manage with South Kensington.

With our love to Mrs. Foster and you.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[This letter, as he says a week later, was written when he] “was rather down in the mouth from the wretched cold weather, and the wife being laid up with a bad cold,” [besides his own ailments.]

I find I have to be very careful about night air, but nothing does me so much good as six or seven miles’ walk between breakfast and lunch—­at a good sharp pace.  So I conclude that there cannot be much the matter, and yet I am always on the edge, so to speak, of that infernal hypochondria.

We have settled down here very comfortably, and I do not think we shall care to go any further south.  Madame Dohrn and all the people at the stazione are very kind, and want to do all sorts of things for us.  The other day we went in the launch to Capri, intending next day to go to Amalfi.  But it threatened bad weather, so we returned in the evening.  The journey knocked us both up, and we had to get out of another projected excursion to Ischia to-day.  The fact is, I get infinitely tired with talking to people and can’t stand any deviation from regular and extremely lazy habits.  Fancy my being always in bed by ten o’clock and breakfasting at nine!

[On the 10th, writing to Sir John Evans, who as Vice-President, was acting in his stead at the Royal Society, he says:—­]

In spite of snow on the ground we had three or four days at Ravenna—­which is the most interesting deadly lively sepulchre of a place I was ever in in my life.  The evolution of modern from ancient art is all there in a nutshell...

I lead an altogether animal life, except that I have renewed my old love for Italian.  At present I am rejoicing in the Autobiography of that delightful sinner, Benvenuto Cellini.  I have some notion that there is such a thing as science somewhere.  In fact I am fitting myself for Neapolitan nobility.