My dear Dohrn,

In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and
thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I
have not written to you. But in another sense, I do not, for I have
very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you
once before, your memory always remains green in the "happy family."

But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion
to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer
I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content
to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we
meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off,
I shall be a friendless old man.

As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture says that "a
living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a living dog. By the
way, I bought Cotta's edition of him the other day, and there he
stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble
edges. Do you know I did a version of his "Aphorisms on Nature" into
English the other day. [For the first number of "Nature," November
1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little. When they
began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly
gone mad!

But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received your
volume on the "Arthropods" the other day, but I shall not be able to
look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my
lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological
Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of