I thought you had given me quite enough praise in your first letter, but am not on that account the less pleased at the high compliment you pay me in the second one.¹ The ending up was what the people at the Institution seemed to like best.

Pray do not think that I have yet made up my mind about the ‘muslin.’ On the contrary, the more I work at the tissues of Aurelia the more puzzled I become, so that I am thankful for all criticisms.² If Aurelia stood alone, I should be inclined to take your view, and attribute blocking of contractile waves in spiral strips, &c., to some accidental strain previously suffered by the tissue at the area of blocking. But the fact that in Tiaropsis the polypite is so quick and precise in localising a needle prick, seems to show that here there must be something more definite in the way of conducting tissue than in Drosera, although I confess it is most astonishing how precise the localising function, as described by you, is in the latter.³ In ‘Nature’ I did not express my doubts, but it was because I feared there may yet turn out to be a skeleton in the cupboard that I kept all these more or less fishy deductions out of the R.S. papers. Further work may perhaps make the matter more certain one way or another. Possibly the miscroscope may show something, and so I have asked Schäfer to come down, who, as I know from experience, is what spiritualists call ‘a sensitive’— I mean he can see ghosts of things where other people can’t. But still, if he can make out anything in the jelly of Aurelia, I shall confess it to be the best case of clairvoyance I ever knew.⁴

I am very glad you have drawn my attention prominently to the localising function in Drosera, as it is very likely I have been too keen in my scent after nerves; and I believe it is chiefly by comparing lines of work that in such novel phenomena truth is to be got at. And this reminds me of an observation which I think ought to be made on some of the excitable plants. It is a fact not generally known, even to professed physiologists, that if you pass a constant current through an excised muscle two or three times successively in the same direction, the responses to make and break become much more feeble than at first, so that unless you began with a strong current for the first of the series, you have to strengthen it for the third or fourth of the series in order to procure a contraction. But on now reversing the direction of the current, the muscle is tremendously excitable for the first stimulation, less so for the second, and so on. Now this rapidly exhausting effect of passing the current successively in the same direction, and the wonderful effect of reversing it, point, I believe, to something very fundamental in the constitution of muscular tissue. The complementary effects in question are quite as decided in the jelly-fish as in frog’s muscle; so I think it would be very interesting to try the experiment on the contractile tissues of plants. But there are so many things to write about that I am afraid of ‘bothering you,’ and this with much more reason that you can have to be afraid of ‘bothering’ me.

Aurelia is, as you say, ‘a fine case,’ and I often wish you could see the experiments.

Very sincerely and most respectfully yours, | Geo. J. Romanes.