26 Abbey Place, January 30, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I have not written to you.  But in another sense, I do not, for I have very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you once before, your memory always remains green in the “happy family.”

But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off, I shall be a friendless old man.

As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken.  The Scripture says that “a living dog is better than a dead lion,” and I am a living dog.  By the way, I bought Cotta’s edition of him the other day, and there he stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble edges.  Do you know I did a version of his “Aphorisms on Nature” into English the other day. [For the first number of “Nature,” November 1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little.  When they began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly gone mad!

But to return to your affairs instead of my own.  I received your volume on the “Arthropods” the other day, but I shall not be able to look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of office as President expires.

After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings and, as always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest interest.  But I wish you would not take it into your head that Darwin or I, or any one else thinks otherwise than highly of you, or that you need “re-establishing” in any one’s eyes.  But I hope you will not have finished your work before the autumn, as they have made me President of the British Association this year, and I shall be very busy with my address in the summer.  The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on the 14th September, and I live in hope that you will be able to come over.  Let me know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.

I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet.  But for Heaven’s sake don’t be angry with me in English again.  It’s far worse than a scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I have my German friends.

[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and the Doctrine of Evolution” “Collected Essays” 8.) He took the opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed out the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in particular traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a series of fossil types approaching more and more to a generalised ungulate type and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or collateral of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two other toes which appertain to the average quadruped.]