Another letter, also written from Kelso, on 15th June, says:-- Man--I feel awfully tempted to go to Sweden, where I have the promise of meeting with a warm welcome from some of the geologists. But I can’t go, and have reluctantly had to delay a visit till next year. I continue now and again to get a gratifying letter about my papers which cheers me up amazingly. Woodward the editor[2] writes to-night congratulating me on the wind-up, and saying that everyone speaks highly of my lucubrations. After trying my hands at many things I think I have at last got into the right groove. The noble hammer-bearing fraternity have not heard the last of my “theories.” ... What a fertile source of amusement this blessed Glacial Epoch has been! [2] Of the _Geological Magazine_, in which the glacial papers had appeared. The summer holiday this year was spent in Lewis, but the chief record which remains is that contained in papers contributed to the _Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society_ and the _Geological Magazine_. In September he writes from Norham an affectionate letter to Dr Grossart, expressing longing for a “haver,” and giving news of his glacial work. The letter goes on:-- How does the _magnum opus_ progress? I am still working away at mine--nearly finished--both me and my book. I got some very startling facts this summer in the island of Lewis which I shall send to the London Geolog. Society--the facts, not the island. A month later he writes from Duns to Mr Horne in regard to some specimens which he wants for a course of lectures to be given to working-men at the Museum of Science and Art during the winter. In this letter he speaks of being attacked by a form of nervous prostration which renders him incapable of continued work, so that the _magnum opus_ is at a standstill. The task was evidently proving more severe than he anticipated, and the illness was prolonged, for in a letter to Dr Grossart, written from Edinburgh on 4th January 1873, he says:-- This winter things have gone back with me. I was laid up most of November and December, but am now all right again. But this enforced idleness has kept back my book, which the longer I stick at it seems to grow and grow till I begin to get frightened at its dimensions. This summer, however, I hope to send it to the printer. In the same letter he speaks of his lectures at the Museum of Science and Art, and also of another on the “Antiquity of Man in Britain,” which he was to give at Birkenhead at the beginning of February. The lecture, which was duly delivered and also published, dealt with a subject to which he had been led by his glacial work. It was one in which his interest increased as time went on, and in later years “Man during the Ice Age” occupied a good deal of his leisure, up to the very end.