office as President expires.

After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings and, as
always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest interest. But I
wish you would not take it into your head that Darwin or I, or any one
else thinks otherwise than highly of you, or that you need
"re-establishing" in any one's eyes. But I hope you will not have
finished your work before the autumn, as they have made me President
of the British Association this year, and I shall be very busy with my
address in the summer. The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on
the 14th September, and I live in hope that you will be able to come
over. Let me know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.

I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet. But for Heaven's
sake don't be angry with me in English again. It's far worse than a
scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I
have my German friends.

[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological
Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and
the Doctrine of Evolution" "Collected Essays" 8.) He took the
opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed
out the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in
particular traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a
series of fossil types approaching more and more to a generalised
ungulate type and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or
collateral of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two
other toes which appertain to the average quadruped.]

If [he said] the expectation raised by the splints of horses that, in