They are quite suited to one another and I would not wish a better match for her. And whatever annoyances and social pin-pricks may come in Ethel's way, I know nobody less likely to care about them. We shall have to go to Norway, I believe, to get the business done. In the meantime, my wife (who has been laid up with bronchitic cold ever since we came home) and I have had as much London as we can stand, and are off to-morrow to Eastbourne again, but to more sheltered quarters. I hope Lady Hooker and you are thriving. Don't conceal the news from her, as my wife is always accusing me of doing. Ever yours, T.H. Huxley. To Mr. W.F. Collier. 4 Marlborough Place, January 24, 1889. Many thanks for your kind letter. I have as strong an affection for Jack as if he were my own son, and I have felt very keenly the ruin we involuntarily brought upon him--by our poor darling's terrible illness and death. So that if I had not already done my best to aid and abet other people in disregarding the disabilities imposed by the present monstrous state of the law, I should have felt bound to go as far as I could towards mending his life. Ethel is just suited to him...Of course I could have wished that she should be spared the petty annoyances which she must occasionally expect. But I know of no one less likely to care for them. Your Shakespere parable is charming--but I am afraid it must be put among the endless things that are read IN to the "divine Williams" as the Frenchman called him. [The second part of the letter replies to the question whether Shakespeare had any notion of the existence of the sexes in plants and the part played in their fertilisation by insects, which, of course, would be prevented from visiting them by rainy weather, when he wrote in the "Midsummer Night's Dream":-- The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye, And when she weeps, weeps every little flower Lamenting some enforced chastity.] There was no knowledge of the sexes of plants in Shakespere's time, barring some vague suggestion about figs and dates. Even in the 18th century, after Linnaeus, the observations of Sprengel, who was a man of genius, and first properly explained the action of insects, were set aside and forgotten. I take it that Shakespere is really alluding to the "enforced chastity" of Dian (the moon). The poets ignore that little Endymion business when they like! I have recovered in such an extraordinary fashion that I can plume myself on being an "interesting case," though I am not going to compete with you in that line. And if you look at the February "Nineteenth" I hope you will think that my brains are none the worse. But perhaps that conceited speech is evidence that they are. We came to town to make the acquaintance of Nettie's fiance, and I am happy to say the family takes to him. When it does not take to anybody, it is the worse for that anybody.