etc. etc., is quite astounding and
unintelligible!...
There is another thing you have not heard yet, but it will be announced
soon. Sir W. Crookes, as Secretary of the Royal Institution, wrote to me
two weeks back asking me very strongly to give them a lecture at their
opening meeting (third week in January) appropriate to the Jubilee of
the "Origin of Species." I was very unwell at the time--could eat
nothing, etc.--and was going to decline positively, having nothing more
to say! But while lying down, vaguely thinking about it, an idea flashed
upon me of a new treatment of the whole subject of Darwinism, just
suitable for a lecture to a R.I. audience. I felt at once there was
something that ought to be said, and that I should like to say--so I
actually wrote and accepted, provisionally. My voice has so broken that
unless I can improve it I fear not being heard, but Crookes promised to
read it either wholly, or leaving to me the opening and concluding
paragraphs. I was very weak--almost a skeleton--but I am now getting
much better. But finishing up the "Spruce" book, and now all these
honours and congratulations and letters, etc., are giving me much work,
yet I am getting strong again, and really hope to do this "lecture" as
my last stroke for Darwinism against the Mutationists and Mendelians,
but much more effective, I hope, than my article in the August
_Contemporary Review_, though that was pretty strong.
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