As soon as I received your first intimation about Schneider’s book I wrote over for it, and received a copy some weeks ago.¹ I then lent it to Sully,² who wanted to read it, so do not yet know what it is worth. I, together with my wife—who reads French much more quickly than I can—am now engaged upon all the French books on animal intelligence which you kindly lent me.³ I am also preparing for my Royal Institution lecture on the 7th of May. I will afterwards publish it in some of the magazines, and, last of all, in an expanded and more detailed form, it will go into my book on Animal Intelligence.⁴

I went to see [Wallace] the other day on Spiritualism. He answered privately a letter that I wrote to ‘Nature,’ signed ‘F.R.S.,’ which was a feeler for some material to investigate.⁵ I had never spoken to [Wallace] before, but although I passed a very pleasant afternoon with him, I did not learn anything new about Spiritualism. He seemed to me to have the faculty of deglutition too well developed. Thus, for instance, he seemed rather queer on the subject of astrology! and when I asked whether he thought it worthy of common sense to imagine that, spirits or no spirits, the conjunctions of planets could exercise any causative influence on the destinies of children born under them, he answered that having already ‘swallowed so much,’ he did not know where to stop!!

My wife and baby⁶ are both flourishing. I noticed that the latter, at four days old, could always tell which hand I touched, inclining its head towards that hand.