H.M.S. Zisgard.
Portsmouth.
England.
Feb. 25. 1912.
Dear Professor Haeckel.
I can never thank you enough for your great kindness in signing the photographs for me. Yu have made me a proud man.
The two sketches are charming, they make me long again for the tropies and and on looking at them I can almost hear the shrill note of the Cicadas, the clicking of the lizards, and the distant roll of the native drum, for I, too, Sir, have been in Ceylon, and on four different occasions. My first visit was in 1898, long after your visit, and I rode on my bicycle from Colombo to Kandy, an uphill ride of some 80 || miles, most of it through tropical jungle on each side of the road. You can therefore imagine a how very much I appreciate the sketches, bringing back as they do, many vivid and happy memories. They and the two enlargements are now in the hands of the framers and are to the on board by Wednesday.
Your article on Darwin, also, I thank you for; a friend is translating it to me: The immortal name of our illustrious countryman, Darwin, will always be associated with the discovery of Evolution, and rightly so, for the first set it upon a solid, impregnable rock, he was the first to convert theory into fact. To you, Sir, belongs the credit for not only having popularised and rendered assimilable the hard dry facts which Darwin amassed in rich profession || but for having been one of the first, if not the first, to point out, with that fearless courage so characteristic of you, that the doctrine of descent knows no boundaries nor barriers – is applicable to everything, and embraces not only religion, ethics, morals, customs and politics but the whole of the animate and the inanimate too. And how your prophecies are coming true. Mendeleef speculating on the origin of all elements from the primordial Ether. Thompson throwing doubts on to what used to be considered one of the most fundamental and inalienable b attitudes of Matter – Mass, by showing that as the velocity of matter increases, so its ‚mass‘ decreases, from which he assumes that when matter || hast the velocity of light, its mass is zero.
Someday, I hope, with your permission, when onc a visit to your country to look over your Museum of Evolution of which I have heard so much, and perhaps, then, you will allow me to thank you verbally in person.
Hoping you have quite recovered from your accident and with my very best wishes and respects.
Believe me.
Yours sincerely.
C. Marsh. Beadnell.
a gestr.: then; b gestr.: xxx; c gestr.: to pay, eingef.: when on