In the meanwhile I have not been idle, as I hope to show you by the various papers enclosed with this. You will recollect that on the Salpae. No one here knew anything about them, and I thought that all my results were absolutely new--until, me miserum! I found them in a little paper of Krohn's in the "Annales des Sciences" for 1846, without any figures to draw anybody's attention. The memoir on the Medusae (which I sent to you) has, I hear, just escaped a high honour--to wit, the Royal Medal. The award has been made to Newport for his paper on "Impregnation." I had no idea that anything I had done was likely to have the slightest claim to such distinction, but I was informed yesterday by one of the Council that the balance hung pretty evenly, and was only decided by their thinking my memoir was too small and short. I have been working in all things with a reference to wide views of zoological philosophy, and the report upon the Echinoderms is intended in common with the mem. on the Salpae to explain my views of Individuality among the lower animals--views which I mean to illustrate still further and enunciate still more clearly in my book that is to be. [He lectured on this subject at the Royal Institution in 1852.] They have met with approval from Carpenter, as you will see by the last edition of his "Principles of Physiology," and I think that Forbes and some others will be very likely eventually to come round to them, but everything that relates to abstract thought is at a low ebb among the mass of naturalists in this country. In the paper upon "Thalassicolla," and in that which I read before the British Association, as also in one upon the organisation of the Rotifera, which I am going to have published in the Microscopical Society's "Transactions," I have been driving in a series of wedges into Cuvier's Radiata, and showing how selon moi they ought to be distributed. I am every day becoming more and more certain that you were on the right track thirty years ago in your views of the order and symmetry to be traced in the true natural system. During the next session I mean to send in a paper to the Royal Society upon the "Homologies of the Mollusca," which shall astonish them. I want to get done for the Mollusca what Savigny did for the Articulata, namely to show how they all--Cephalopoda, Gasteropoda, Pteropoda, Heteropoda, etc.--are organised in each. What with this and the book, I shall have enough to do for the next six months. You will doubtless ask what is the practical outlook of all this? whether it leads anywhere in the direction of bread and cheese? To this also I can give a tolerably satisfactory answer.