SAVILE CLUB
15. SAVILE ROW
Exeter College
Oxford
Dec. 31st
My dear Professor Haeckel,
I must thank you very much for your kind attention in sending the part of your Calcareous Sponges. I know that such a work must be costly and that there are a great number who have claims upon your spare copies before I have. It is very good of you to acknowledge my || contribution to the propagation of your views in England. I was also greatly interested in the general part in which you speak of the Keim-blätter Theorie, for I have been teaching very much what you have there said (in consequence of having read your writings and those of Kowalewsky) at Oxford. There is one point which I should like to submit to you, as to the relations of the Coelom and the Mesoderm (mittel-blatt). In the Worms which you mention as || not possessing a Coelom – viz. Trematoda, Taeniada, Turbellaria – do you not think (as I must say I do) that the incomplete vascular system of many of these Worms – ought to be looked at as an incompletely developed Coelom: for instance the vascular system with a cellular network across it – as recently described in Bothriocephalus, also the vascular system of Trematoda & some Turbellaria || which communicates with the exterior by means of ciliated ducts. (segment organs). The a chief part of the vascular system in such worms seems to correspond with the Coelom – whilst the ciliated part near to the orifice of communication with the exterior corresponds with the „segment organ” which is an in-pushing from the outer-layer – (though Kowalewsky says it is not).
You will be glad to know || that several sheets of your Schopfungsgeschichte are now already translated. I propose to call it simply „The History of Creation” in order not to frighten the pious English public. There is a letter from Darwin in the third chapter, which I should like to have a copy of in the original English, instead of a re-translation if you can send one – and perhaps at the same time you would be kind enough to send anything else of the kind, which you think would be necessary in the context of the || translation.
I shall send to you through a bookseller Bastian’s book, and hope you will look at it – if only from curiosity – and express your opinion on it – in a few lines. It would help us greatly in this country to make it clearly understood that this man Bastian, is a mere phantasist.
Believe me, dear Professor Haeckel
Very sincerely yours
E. Ray Lankester
P.S: Mr Churchill has a boundb set of the Microscopical Journal from the first about 20 volumes for which he will take 10 shillings a volume.
a gestr.: main; b eingef.: bound