I have left your last letter so long unanswered in order that I might be able to let you know the result of the next experiment I was trying on the seeds with flashing light.² I think in the end the conclusion will be that short flashes, such as I am now using, influence the seedlings, but only to a comparatively small degree, so that it is only the more sensitive seedlings that perceive them.

Your letter in the ‘Times’ was in every way admirable, and coming from you will produce more effect than it could from anybody else. The answer to-day to —— is also first-rate—just enough without being too much. It would have been a great mistake to have descended into a controversy. I thought —— had more wit than to adopt such a tack and tone, and am sure that all physiologists will be for ever grateful to you for such a trenchant expression of opinion.³

I have a little piece of gossip to tell. Yesterday the Council of the Linnean nominated me Zoological Secretary, and some of the members having pressed me to accept, I have accepted. I also hear that your son is to be on the same Council, and that Sir John Lubbock is to be the new President.⁴

I have at length decided on the arrangement of my material for the books on Animal Intelligence and Mental Evolution. I shall reserve all the heavier parts of theoretical discussion for the second book—making the first the chief repository of facts, with only a slender network of theory to bind them into mutual relation, and save the book as much as possible from the danger that you suggested of being too much matter-of-fact.⁵ It will be an advantage to have the facts in a form to admit of brief reference when discussing the heavier philosophy in the second book, which will be the more important, though the less popular, of the two.