During this spring also he was still engaged, with varying fortunes, upon his _Prehistoric Europe_, a task of great magnitude on account of the enormous number of references and the labour which these involved. Thus a letter written early in March represents, as it were, the trough of the wave--he tires of the book at intervals, thinking it will never do, and throws it aside in a “kind o’ scunner.” Another letter at the end of May shows him on the crest of a new wave of enthusiasm. He had just received many new pamphlets from “furrin’ parts,” mostly inspired by his own glacial work, often accompanied by letters from the authors. Thus he says:-- Dr A. Penck of Leipzig writes to the effect that it was the reading of _Great Ice Age_ that first opened his eyes to the meaning of the Diluvium of Northern Germany. He says he has got evidence of three glaciations with intervening glacial deposits! He says he has all the burning enthusiasm of a convert! His letter has greatly gratified me, of course. I see he is an old hand and has done a lot of geological work. Then I have a long letter from a Dr R. Lehmann of Halle, who is also congratulatory at the success with which the German Drifts have recently been explained on the principles laid down in my book!! Also, some duffers have sent me their photographs! I wonder what has so suddenly wakened them up. Helland has a long and interesting paper on the German Drift which I suppose you will see: also a batch of papers on same subject from Prof. Berendt of Berlin. I don’t know how I am to get through all the Swedish and Norwegian papers I have received. They are so hard to read. A postscript to this letter says:--“Pray excuse the exulting egotism of this epistle. I would not write so to anyone else.” But while glacial work was thus occupying most of his attention, lighter subjects were not altogether forgotten. In another letter to Mr Horne, written on Good Friday, he says:-- In a few days I am going to ask you to do me a favour, which is to run your eye over some MS. I shall send you. You need not read it all through--that would be too much of a good thing--but just dip into it here and there, and see what it is like. You will laugh when I tell you that the MS. is poetry, translations from the German. These have been lying beside me for some ten or twelve years. I was urged by several friends of good judgment to publish them long ago. But I would not be induced to do so, so I laid them aside until I had quite forgotten them and could read them and criticise them as if they had been the lucubrations of another man. They bore this better than I expected, and I gathered together all I could find and have had them copied out and stitched into a volume.