You have been very generous as always; and I hope that other folk may follow your example, but like yourself I am not sanguine.

I have had an awfully tempting offer to go to Yankee-land on a lecturing expedition, and I am seriously thinking of making an experiment next spring.

The chance of clearing two or three thousand pounds in as many months is not to be sneezed at by a pere de famille.  I am getting sick of the state of things here.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

I have heard no more about the spirit photographs!

4 Marlborough Place, April 16, 1874.

My dear Darwin,

Put my contribution into the smallest type possible, for it will be read by none but anatomists; and never mind where it goes.

I am glad you agree with me about the hand and foot and skull question.  As Ward [W.G.  Ward.] said of Mill’s opinions, you can only account for the views of Messrs. —­ and Co. on the supposition of “grave personal sin” on their part.

I had a letter from Dohrn a day or two ago in which he tells me he has written to you.  I suspect he has been very ill.

Let us know when you are in town, and believe me,

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The allusion in the letter of March 31 to certain “spirit photographs” refers to a series of these wonderful productions sent to him by a connection of Mr. Darwin’s, who was interested in these matters, and to whom he replied, showing how the effect might have been produced by simple mechanical means.

It was at this gentleman’s house that in January a carefully organised seance was held, at which my father was present incognito, so far as the medium was concerned, and on which he wrote the following report to Mr. Darwin, referred to in his “Life,” volume 3 page 187.

It must be noted that he had had fairly extensive experience of spiritualism; he had made regular experiments with Mrs. Haydon at his brother George’s house (the paper on which these are recorded is undated, but it must have been before 1863); he was referred to as a disbeliever in an article in the “Pall Mall Gazette” during January 1869, as a sequel to which a correspondent sent him an account of the confessions of the Fox girls, who had started spiritualism forty years before.  At the houses of other friends, he had attended seances and met mediums by whom he was most unfavourably impressed.

Moreover, when invited to join a committee of investigation into spiritualistic manifestations, he replied:—­]