Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

CHAPTER 1.16.

1860-1861.

[The letters given in the following chapters illustrate the occupations and interests of the years 1860 to 1863, apart from the struggle over the species question.

One of the most important and most engrossing was the launching of a scientific quarterly to do more systematically and thoroughly what had been done since 1858 in the fortnightly scientific column of the "Saturday Review." Its genesis is explained in the following letter:—]

July 17, 1860.

My dear Hooker,

Some time ago Dr. Wright of Dublin talked to me about the "Natural History Review," which I believe to a great extent belongs to him, and wanted me to join in the editorship, provided certain alterations were made. I promised to consider the matter, and yesterday he and Greene dined with me, and I learned that Haughton and Galbraith were out of the review—that Harvey was likely to go—that a new series was to begin in January, with Williams and Norgate for publishers over here—that it was to become an English and not a Hibernian concern in fact—and finally, that if I chose to join as one of the editors, the effectual control would be pretty much in my own hands. Now, considering the state of the times, and the low condition of natural history journalisation (always excepting quarterly "Mic. Journal") in this country this seems to me to be a fine opening for a plastically minded young man, and I am decidedly inclined to close with the offer, though I shall get nothing but extra work by it.

To limit the amount of this extra work, however, I must get co-editors, and I have written to Lubbock and to Rolleston (also plastically minded young men) to see if they will join. Now up to this point you have been in a horrid state of disgust, because you thought I was going to ask you next. But I am not, for rejoiced as I should be to have you, I know you have heaps of better work to do, and hate journalism.

But can you tell me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is properly worked. How about Oliver?

And though you can't and won't be an editor yourself, won't you help us and pat us on the back?

The tone of the "Review" will be mildly episcopophagous, and you and Darwin and Lyell will have a fine opportunity if you wish it of slaying your adversaries.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Several of his elder friends tried to dissuade him from an undertaking which would inevitably distract him from his proper work. Sir Charles Lyell prophesied that all the work would drift to the most energetic member of the staff, and Huxley writes to Hooker, August 2, 1860:—]

Darwin wrote me a very kind expostulation about it, telling me I ought not to waste myself on other than original work. In reply, however, I assured him that I MUST waste myself willy-nilly, and that the "Review" was only a save-all.

The more I think of it the more it seems to me it ought to answer if properly conducted, and it ought to be of great use.

[The first number appeared in January 1861. Writing on the 6th, Huxley says:—]

It is pleasant to get such expressions of opinion as I have had from Lyell and Darwin about the Review. They make me quite hopeful about its prosperity, as I am sure we shall be able to do better than our first number.

[It was not long, however, before Lyell's prophecy began to come true.
In June Huxley writes:—]

It is no use letting other people look after the journal. I find unless
I revise every page of it, it goes wrong.

[But in July 1863 he definitely ceased to contribute:—]

I did not foresee all this crush of work [he writes], when the "Review" was first started, or I should not have pledged myself to any share in supplying it. [Moreover, with the appointment of paid editors that year, it seemed to him] that the working editors with the credit and pay must take the responsibility of all the commissariat of the "Review" upon their shoulders.

Two years later, in 1865, the "Review" came to an end. As Mr. Murray, the publisher, remarked, quarterlies did not pay; and this quarterly became still more financially unsound after the over-worked volunteers, who both edited and contributed, gave place to paid editors.

But Huxley was not satisfied with one defeat. The quarterly scheme had failed; he now tried if he could not serve science better by returning to a more frequent and more popular form of periodical. From 1863 to 1866 he was concerned with the "Reader," a weekly issue (The committee also included Professor Cairns, F. Galton, W.F. Pollock, and J. Tyndall.); but this also was too heavy a burden to be borne in addition to his other work. However, the labour expended in these ventures was not wholly thrown away. The experience thus gained at last enabled the present Sir Norman Lockyer, who acted as science editor for the "Reader," to realise what had so long been aimed at by the establishment of "Nature" in 1869.

Apart from his contributions to the species question and the foundation of a scientific review, Huxley published in 1860 only two special monographs ("On Jacare and Caiman," and "On the Mouth and Pharynx of the Scorpion," already mentioned as read in the previous year), but he read "Further Observations on Pyrosoma" at the Linnean Society, and was busy with paleontological work, the results of which appeared in three papers the following year, the most important of which was the Memoir called a "Preliminary Essay on the Arrangement of the Devonian Fishes," in the report of the Geological Survey, "which," says Sir M. Foster, "though entitled a Preliminary Essay, threw an entirely new light on the affinities of these creatures, and, with the continuation published later, in 1866, still remains a standard work."

The question of the admission of ladies to the learned societies was already being mooted, and a letter to Sir Charles Lyell gives his ideas thus early not only on this point, but on the general question of women's education.]

March 17, 1860.

My dear Sir Charles,

To use the only forcible expression, I "twig" your meaning perfectly, but I venture to think the parable does not apply. For the Geological Society is not, to my mind, a place of education for students, but a place of discussion for adepts; and the more it is applied to the former purpose the less competent it must become to fulfil the latter—its primary and most important object.

I am far from wishing to place any obstacle in the way of the intellectual advancement and development of women. On the contrary, I don't see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions; and to show you that my ideas are practical I have fully made up my mind, if I can carry out my own plans, to give my daughters the same training in physical science as their brother will get, so long as he is a boy. They, at any rate, shall not be got up as man-traps for the matrimonial market. If other people would do the like the next generation would see women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits—though I don't think that men have anything to fear from their competition. But you know as well as I do that other people won't do the like, and five-sixths of women will stop in the doll stage of evolution to be the stronghold of parsondom, the drag on civilisation, the degradation of every important pursuit with which they mix themselves—"intrigues" in politics, and "friponnes" in science.

If my claws and beak are good for anything they shall be kept from hindering the progress of any science I have to do with.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Three letters to Mr. Spencer show that he had been reading and criticising the proofs of the "First Principles." With regard to the second letter, which gives reasons for rejecting Mr. Spencer's remarks about the power of inflation in birds during flight, it is curious to note Mr. Spencer's reply:—

How oddly the antagonism comes out even when you are not conscious of it! My authority was Owen! I heard him assign this cause for the falling of wounded birds in one of his lectures at the College of Surgeons.]

14 Waverley Place, September 3, 1860.

My dear Spencer,

I return your proofs by this post. To my mind nothing can be better than their contents, whether in matter or in manner, and as my wife arrived, independently, at the same opinion, I think my judgment is not one-sided.

There is something calm and dignified about the tone of the whole—which eminently befits a philosophical work which means to live—and nothing can be more clear and forcible than the argument.

I rejoice that you have made a beginning, and such a beginning—for the more I think about it the more important it seems to me that somebody should think out into a connected system the loose notions that are floating about more or less distinctly in all the best minds.

It seems as if all the thoughts in what you have written were my own, and yet I am conscious of the enormous difference your presentation of them makes in my intellectual state. One is thought in the state of hemp yarn, and the other in the state of rope. Work away, then, excellent rope-maker, and make us more ropes to hold on against the devil and the parsons.

For myself I am absorbed in dogs—gone to the dogs in fact—having been occupied in dissecting them for the last fortnight. You do not say how your health is.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

September 19, 1860.

My dear Spencer,

You will forgive the delay which has occurred in forwarding your proof when I tell you that we have lost our poor little son, our pet and hope. You who knew him well, and know how his mother's heart and mine were wrapped up in him, will understand how great is our affliction. He was attacked with a bad form of scarlet fever on Thursday night, and on Saturday night effusion on the brain set in suddenly and carried him off in a couple of hours. Jessie was taken ill on Friday, but has had the disease quite lightly, and is doing well. The baby has escaped. So end many hopes and plans—sadly enough, and yet not altogether bitterly. For as the little fellow was our greatest joy so is the recollection of him an enduring consolation. It is a heavy payment, but I would buy the four years of him again at the same price. My wife bears up bravely.

I have read your proofs at intervals, and you must not suppose they have troubled me. On the contrary they were at times the only things I could attend to. I agree in the spirit of the whole perfectly. On some matters of detail I had doubts which I am not at present clear-headed enough to think out.

The only thing I object to in toto is the illustration which I have marked at page 24. It is physically impossible that a bird's air-cells should be DISTENDED with air during flight, unless the structure of the parts is in reality different from anything which anatomists at present know. Blowing into the trachea is not to the point. A bird cannot blow into its own trachea, and it has no mechanism for performing a corresponding action.

A bird's chest is essentially a pair of bellows in which the sternum during rest and the back during flight act as movable wall. The air cells may all be represented as soft-walled bags opening freely into the bellows—there being, so far as anatomists yet know, no valves or corresponding contrivances anywhere except at the glottis, which corresponds with the nozzle and air valve both, of our bellows. But the glottis is always opened when the chest is dilated at each inspiration. How then can the air in any air-cell be kept at a higher tension than the surrounding atmosphere?

Hunter experimented on the uses of the air sacs, I know, but I have not his work at hand. It may be that opening one of the air-cells interferes with flight, but I hold it very difficult to conceive that the interference can take place in the way you suppose. How on earth is a lark to sing for ten minutes together if the air-cells are to be kept distended all the while he is up in the air?

At any rate twenty other illustrations will answer your purpose as well, so I would not select one which may be assailed by a carping fellow like

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

October 10, 1860.

My dear Spencer [This was written at the time when Mr. Spencer had issued a notice of discontinuance, and when measures were being taken to prevent it.],

"A wilful man must have his way," and if you won't let me contribute towards the material guarantees for the success of your book, I must be content to add twelve shillings' worth of moral influence to that I already meant to exert per annum in its favour.

I shall be most glad henceforth, as ever, to help your great undertaking in any way I can. The more I contemplate its issues the more important does it seem to me to be, and I assure you that I look upon its success as the business of all of us. So that if it were not a pleasure I should feel it a duty to "push behind" as hard as I can.

Have you seen this quarter's "Westminster?" The opening article on "Neo-Christianity" is one of the most remarkable essays in its way I have ever read. I suppose it must be Newman's. The "Review" is terribly unequal, some of the other articles being absolutely ungrammatically written. What a pity it is it cannot be thoroughly organised.

My wife is a little better, but she is terribly shattered. By the time you come back we shall, I hope, have reverted from our present hospital condition to our normal arrangements, but in any case we shall be glad to see you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following is, I think, the first reference to his fastidiousness in the literary expression and artistic completeness of his work. As he said in an after-dinner speech at a meeting in aid of the Literary Fund, "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing." Anything that was to be published he subjected to repeated revision. And thus, apologising to Hooker for his absence, he writes (August 2, 1860):—]

I was sorry to have to send an excuse by Tyndall the other day, but I found I must finish the Pyrosoma paper, and all last Tuesday was devoted to it, and I fear the next after will have the like fate.

It constantly becomes more and more difficult to me to FINISH things satisfactorily.

[To Hooker also he writes a few days later:—]

I hope your ear is better; take care of yourself, there's a good fellow. I can't do without you these twenty years. We have a devil of a lot to do in the way of smiting the Amalekites.

[Between two men who seldom spoke of their feelings, but let constant intercourse attest them, these words show more than the practical side of their friendship, their community of aims and interests. Quick, strong-willed, and determined as they both were, the fact that they could work together for over forty years without the shadow of a misunderstanding, presupposes an unusually strong friendship firmly based upon mutual trust and respect as well as liking, the beginning of which Sir J. Hooker thus describes:—

My first meeting your father was in 1851, shortly after his return from the "Rattlesnake" voyage with Captain Stanley. Hearing that I had paid some attention to marine zoology during the voyage of the Antarctic Expedition, he was desirous of showing me the results of his studies of the Oceanic Hydrozoa, and he sought me out in consequence. This and the fact that we had both embarked in the Naval service in the same capacity as medical officers and with the same object of scientific research, naturally led to an intimacy which was undisturbed by a shadow of a misunderstanding for nearly forty-five following years. Curiously enough, our intercourse might have dated from an earlier period by nearly six years had I accepted an appointment to the "Rattlesnake" offered me by Captain Stanley, which, but for my having arranged for a journey to India, might have been accepted.

Returning to the purpose of our interview, the researches Mr. Huxley laid before me were chiefly those on the Salpae, a much misunderstood group of marine Hydrozoa. Of these I had amused myself with making drawings during the long and often weary months passed at sea on board the "Erebus," but having other subjects to attend to, I had made no further study of them than as consumers of the vegetable life (Diatoms) of the Antarctic Ocean. Hence his observations on their life-history, habits, and affinities were on almost all points a revelation to me, and I could not fail to recognise in their author all the qualities possessed by a naturalist of commanding ability, industry, and power of exposition. Our interviews, thus commenced, soon ripened into a friendship, which led to an arrangement for a monthly meeting, and in the informal establishment of a club of nine, the other members of which were, Mr. Busk, Dr. Frankland, Mr. Hirst, Sir J. Lubbock, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Dr. Tyndall, and Mr. Spottiswoode.

Just a month after this letter to his friend, the same year which had first brought Huxley public recognition outside his special sphere brought him also the greatest sorrow perhaps of his whole life. I have already spoken of the sudden death of the little son in whom so much of his own and his wife's happiness was centred. The suddenness of the blow made it all the more crushing, and the mental strain, intensified by the sight of his wife's inconsolable grief, brought him perilously near a complete breakdown. But the birth of another son, on December 11, gave the mother some comfort; and as the result of a friendly conspiracy between her and Dr. Tyndall, Huxley himself was carried off for a week's climbing in Wales between Christmas and the New Year.

His reply to a long letter of sympathy in which Charles Kingsley set forth the grounds of his own philosophy as to the ends of life and the hope of immortality, affords insight into the very depths of his nature. It is a rare outburst at a moment of intense feeling, in which, more completely than in almost any other writing of his, intellectual clearness and moral fire are to be seen uniting in a veritable passion for truth:—]

14, Waverley Place, September 23, 1860.

My dear Kingsley,

I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife's account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits—and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you. My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them—and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

And now I feel that it is due to you to speak as frankly as you have done to me. An old and worthy friend of mine tried some three or four years ago to bring us together—because, as he said, you were the only man who would do me any good. Your letter leads me to think he was right, though not perhaps in the sense he attached to his own words.

To begin with the great doctrine you discuss. I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.

Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality?

You rest in your strong conviction of your personal existence, and in the instinct of the persistence of that existence which is so strong in you as in most men.

To me this is as nothing. That my personality is the surest thing I know—may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties. I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the non-ego, about noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth.

It must be twenty years since, a boy, I read Hamilton's essay on the unconditioned, and from that time to this, ontological speculation has been a folly to me. When Mansel took up Hamilton's argument on the side of orthodoxy (!) I said he reminded me of nothing so much as the man who is sawing off the sign on which he is sitting, in Hogarth's picture. But this by the way.

I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I was before.

Nor does the infinite difference between myself and the animals alter the case. I do not know whether the animals persist after they disappear or not. I do not even know whether the infinite difference between us and them may not be compensated by THEIR persistence and MY cessation after apparent death, just as the humble bulb of an annual lives, while the glorious flowers it has put forth die away.

Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind—that my own highest aspirations even—lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.

Science has taught to me the opposite lesson. She warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

There are, however, other arguments commonly brought forward in favour of the immortality of man, which are to my mind not only delusive but mischievous. The one is the notion that the moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future rewards and punishments. The other is: that such a system is indispensable to practical morality. I believe that both these dogmas are very mischievous lies.

With respect to the first, I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Government (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the "customs of matter") is wholly just. The more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my own), the more obvious it is to me that the wicked does NOT flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the WHOLE law—physical as well as moral—and that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa.

The ledger of the Almighty is strictly kept, and every one of us has the balance of his operations paid over to him at the end of every minute of his existence.

Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding universe—that conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In short, as we live we are paid for living.

And it is to be recollected in view of the apparent discrepancy between men's acts and their rewards that Nature is juster than we. She takes into account what a man brings with him into the world, which human justice cannot do. If I, born a bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me, but I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done the same thing.

The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any scientific fact. The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so—for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us all—nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.

Not only, then, do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this life leads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.

If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me from evil-doing, surely a fortiori the certainty of hell now will do so? If a man could be firmly impressed with the belief that stealing damaged him as much as swallowing arsenic would do (and it does), would not the dissuasive force of that belief be greater than that of any based on mere future expectations?

And this leads me to my other point.

As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, "If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge.

Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily, my course was arrested in time—before I had earned absolute destruction—and for long years I have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards better things. And when I look back, what do I find to have been the agents of my redemption? The hope of immortality or of future reward? I can honestly say that for these fourteen years such a consideration has not entered my head. No, I can tell you exactly what has been at work. "Sartor Resartus" led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition. Thirdly, love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature, and impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility.

If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy's grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.

And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, "Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders."

I know right well that 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him. [The law with respect to oaths was reformed in 1869.]

But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is—a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy.

I have spoken more openly and distinctly to you than I ever have to any human being except my wife.

If you can show me that I err in premises or conclusion, I am ready to give up these as I would any other theories. But at any rate you will do me the justice to believe that I have not reached my conclusions without the care befitting the momentous nature of the problems involved.

And I write this the more readily to you, because it is clear to me that if that great and powerful instrument for good or evil, the Church of England, is to be saved from being shivered into fragments by the advancing tide of science—an event I should be very sorry to witness, but which will infallibly occur if men like Samuel of Oxford are to have the guidance of her destinies—it must be by the efforts of men who, like yourself, see your way to the combination of the practice of the Church with the spirit of science. Understand that all the younger men of science whom I know intimately are ESSENTIALLY of my way of thinking. (I know not a scoffer or an irreligious or an immoral man among them, but they all regard orthodoxy as you do Brahmanism.) Understand that this new school of the prophets is the only one that can work miracles, the only one that can constantly appeal to nature for evidence that it is right, and you will comprehend that it is of no use to try to barricade us with shovel hats and aprons, or to talk about our doctrines being "shocking."

I don't profess to understand the logic of yourself, Maurice, and the rest of your school, but I have always said I would swear by your truthfulness and sincerity, and that good must come of your efforts. The more plain this was to me, however, the more obvious the necessity to let you see where the men of science are driving, and it has often been in my mind to write to you before.

If I have spoken too plainly anywhere, or too abruptly, pardon me, and do the like to me.

My wife thanks you very much for your volume of sermons.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A letter written in reply to the suggestion that he should carry out Hooker's own good resolutions of keeping out of the turmoil of life, and devoting himself to pure science, seems to indicate in its tone something of the stress of the time when it was written:—]

Jermyn Street, December 19, 1860.

My dear Hooker,

What with one thing and another, I have almost forgotten to answer your note—and first, as to the business matter…Next as to my own private affairs, the youngster is "a swelling wisibly," and my wife is getting on better than I hoped, though not quite so well as I could have wished. The boy's advent is a great blessing to her in all ways. For myself I hardly know yet whether it is pleasure or pain. The ground has gone from under my feet once, and I hardly know how to rest on anything again. Irrational, you will say, but nevertheless natural. And finally as to your resolutions, my holy pilgrim, they will be kept about as long as the resolutions of other anchorites who are thrown into the busy world, or I won't say that, for assuredly you will take the world "as coolly as you can," and so shall I. But that coolness amounts to the red heat of properly constructed mortals.

It is no use having any false modesty about the matter. You and I, if we last ten years longer, and you by a long while first, will be the representatives of our respective lines in this country. In that capacity we shall have certain duties to perform to ourselves, to the outside world, and to science. We shall have to swallow praise which is no great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous basting and irritations, which will involve a good deal of unquestionable pain. Don't flatter yourself that there is any moral chloroform by which either you or I can render ourselves insensible or acquire the habit of doing things coolly. It is assuredly of no great use to tear one's self to pieces before one is fifty. But the alternative, for men constructed on the high pressure tubular boiler principle, like ourselves, is to lie still and let the devil have his own way. And I will be torn to pieces before I am forty sooner than see that.

I have been privately trading on my misfortunes in order to get a little peace and quietness for a few months. If I can help it I don't mean to do any dining out this winter, and I have cut down Societies to the minimum of the Geological, from which I cannot get away.

But it won't do to keep this up too long. By and by one must drift into the stream again, and then there is nothing for it but to pull like mad unless we want to be run down by every collier.

I am going to do one sensible thing, however, viz. to rush down to Llanberis with Busk between Christmas Day and New Year's Day and get my lungs full of hill-air for the coming session.

I was at Down on Saturday and saw Darwin. He seems fairly well, and his daughter was up and looks better than I expected to see her.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Meanwhile, he took the opportunity to make the child's birth a new link with his old friend, and wrote as follows :—]

14 Waverley Place, January 3, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

If I had nothing else to write about I must wish you a Happy New Year and many on 'em; but, in fact, my wife and I have a great favour to ask of you, which is neither more nor less than to stand godfather for our little son. You know my opinions on these matters, and I would not ask you to do anything I would not do myself, so if you consent, the clerk shall tell all the lies for you, and you shall be asked to do nothing else than to help devour the christening feed, and be as good a friend to the boy as you have been to his father.

My wife will have the youngster christened, although I am always in a bad temper from the time it is talked about until the ceremony is over. The only way of turning the farce into a reality is by making it an extra bond with one's friends. On the other hand, if you have any objection to say, "all this I steadfastly believe," even by deputy, I know you will have no hesitation in saying so, and in giving me as frank a refusal as my request. [As against his dislike of consenting to a rite, to him meaningless, he was moved by a feeling which in part corresponded to Descartes' morale par provision,—in part was an acknowledgment of the possibilities of individual development, making it only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual organisation of its country, which it could either ignore or continue on reaching intellectual maturity.]

Let me know if you have any fault to find with the new "Review." I think you will see it would have been a dreadful business to translate all the German titles in the bibliography. I returned from a ramble about Snowdon with Busk and Tyndall on the 31st, all the better. My wife is decidedly improved, though she mends but slowly.

Our best wishes to you and all yours.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Any fragments from the rich man's table for the next Number of "N.H.R.?"

14 Waverley Place, January 6, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

My wife and I were very pleased to get your hearty and kind acceptance of Godfathership. We shall not call upon you for some time, I fancy, as the mistress doesn't get strong very fast. However, I am only glad she is well as she is. She came down yesterday for the first time.

It is very pleasant to get such expressions of opinion as I have had from you, Lyell, and Darwin about the "Review." They make me quite hopeful about its prosperity, as I am sure we shall be able to do better than our first number.

I am glad you liked what I said in the opening of my article. [(In the "Natural History Review" 1861 page 67—]"The proof of his claim to independent parentage will not change the brutishness of man's lower nature; nor, except in those valet souls who cannot see greatness in their fellow because his father was a cobbler, will the demonstration of a pithecoid pedigree one whit diminish man's divine right of kingship over nature; nor lower the great and princely dignity of perfect manhood, which is an order of nobility not inherited, but to be won by each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their fittest use.") I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of matter. I dislike them even more than I do the pietists.

Some of these days I shall look up the ape question again, and go over the rest of the organisation in the same way. But in order to get a thorough grip of the question, I must examine into a good many points for myself. The results, when they do come out, will, I foresee, astonish the natives.

I am cold-proof, and all the better for the Welsh trip. To say truth, I was just on the edge of breaking down when I went. Did I ever send you a letter of mine on the teaching of Natural History? It was published while you were away, and I forget whether I sent it or not. However, a copy accompanies this note…

Of course there will be room for your review and welcome. I have put it down and reckon on it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Huxley returned from the trip to Wales in time to be with his wife for the New Year. The plot she had made with Dr. Tyndall had been entirely successful. The threatened breakdown was averted. Wales in winter was as good as Switzerland. Of the ascent of Snowdon he writes on December 28:] "Both Tyndall and I voted it under present circumstances as good as most things Alpine."

[His wife, however, continued in very weak health. She was prostrated by the loss of her little boy. So in the middle of March he gladly accepted Mr. Darwin's invitation for her and the three children to spend a fortnight in the quiet of his house at Down, where he himself managed to run down for a week end.] "It appears to me," [he writes to his wife,] "that you are subjecting poor Darwin to a savage Tennysonian persecution. I shall see him looking like a martyr and across talk double science next Sunday."

[In April another good friend, Dr. Bence Jones, lent the invalid his house at Folkestone for three months. Unable even to walk when she went there, her recovery was a slow business. Huxley ran down every week; his brother George and his wife also were frequent visitors. Meanwhile he resolved to move into a new house, in order that she might not return to a place so full of sorrowful memories. On May 30 he effected the move to a larger house not half a mile away from Waverley Place—26 Abbey Place (now 23 Abercorn Place). Here also Mrs. Heathorn lived for the next year, my grandfather, over seventy as he was, being compelled to go out again to Australia to look after a business venture of his which had come to grief.

Meantime the old house was still on his hands for another year. Trying to find a tenant, he writes on May 21, 1861:—]

I met J. Tyndall at Ramsay's last night, and I think he is greatly inclined to have the house. I gave him your message and found that a sneaking kindness for the old house actuated him a good deal in wishing to take it. It is not a bad fellow, and we won't do him much on the fixtures.

[Eventually Tyndall and his friend Hirst established themselves there.

This spring Professor Henslow, Mrs. Hooker's father, a botanist of the first rank, and a man extraordinarily beloved by all who came in contact with him, was seized with a mortal illness, and lingered on without hope of recovery through almost the whole of April. Huxley writes:—]

Jermyn Street, April 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

I am very much grieved and shocked by your letter. The evening before last I heard from Busk that your father-in-law had been ill, and that you had been to see him, and I meant to have written to you yesterday to inquire, but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which always seemed to me more prominent in him than in any man I ever knew.

He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.

You know all these things as well as I do, and I know as well as you do that such thoughts do not cure heartache or assuage grief. Such maladies, when men are as old as you and I are, are apt to hang about one a long time, but I find that if they are faced and accepted as part of our fair share of life, a great deal of good is to be got out of them. You will find that too, but in the meanwhile don't go and break yourself down with over wear and tear. The heaviest pull comes after the excitement of a catastrophe of this kind is over.

Believe in my affectionate sympathy with you, and that I am, my dear old fellow, yours ever,

T.H. Huxley.

[And again on the 18th:—]

Many thanks for your two letters. It would be sad to hear of life dragging itself out so painfully and slowly, if it were not for what you tell me of the calmness and wisdom with which the poor sufferer uses such strength as is left him.

One can express neither wish nor hope in such a case. With such a man what is will be well. All I have to repeat is, don't knock yourself up. I wish to God I could help you in some way or other beyond repeating the parrot cry. If I can, of course you will let me know.

[In June 1861 a jotting in his notebook records that he is at work on the chick's skull, part of the embryological work which he took up vigorously at this time, and at once the continuation of his researches on the Vertebrate Skull, embodied in his Croonian lecture of 1858, and the beginning of a long series of investigations into the structure of birds. There is a reference to this in a very interesting letter dealing chiefly with what he conceived to be the cardinal point of the Darwinian theory:—]

26 Abbey Place, September 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

Yesterday being the first day I went to the Athenaeum after reading your note, I had a look at, and a good laugh over, the "Quarterly" article. Who can be the writer?

I have been so busy studying chicken development, a difficult subject to which I had long ago made up my mind to devote my first spare time, that I have written you no word about your article in the "Gardener's Chronicle." I quite agree with the general tendency of your argument, though it seems to me that you put your view rather too strongly when you seem to question the position "that, as a rule, resemblances prevail over differences" between parent and offspring. Surely, as a rule, resemblances DO prevail over differences, though I quite agree with you that the latter have been far too much overlooked. The great desideratum for the species question at present seems to me to be the determination of the law of variation. Because no law has yet been made out, Darwin is obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous or a matter of chance, so that the bishops and superior clergy generally (the only real atheists and believers in chance left in the world) gird at him as if he were another Lucretius.

It is [in] the recognition of a tendency to variation apart from the variation of what are ordinarily understood as external conditions that Darwin's view is such an advance on Lamarck. Why does not somebody go to work experimentally, and get at the law of variation for some one species of plant?

What a capital article that was in the "Athenaeum" the other day apud the Schlagintweits. [The brothers Schlagintweit (four of whom were ultimately employed), who had gained some reputation for their work on the Physical Geography of the Alps, were, on Humboldt's recommendation, despatched by the East India Company in 1854-55-56 to the Deccan, and especially to the Himalayan region (where they were the first Europeans to cross the Kuenlun Mountains), in order to correlate the instruments and observations of the several magnetic surveys of India. But they enlarged the scope of their mission by professing to correct the great trigonometrical survey, while the contract with them was so loosely drawn up that they had practically a roving commission in science, to make researches and publish the results—up to nine volumes—in all manner of subjects, which in fact ranged from the surveying work to ethnology, and were crowned by an additional volume on Buddhism! The original cost to the Indian Government was estimated at 15 thousand pounds sterling; the allowances from the English Government during the inordinately prolonged period of arranging and publishing materials, including payment for sixty copies of each volume, atlas, and so forth, as well as personal payments, came to as much more.

Unfortunately the results were of less value than was expected. The attempt to correct the work done with the large instruments of the trigonometrical survey by means of far smaller instruments was absurd; away from the ground covered by the great survey the figures proved to be very inaccurate. The most annoying part of the affair was that it absorbed the State aid which might have been given to more valuable researches.

The Council of the Royal Society had been consulted as to the advisability of despatching this expedition and opposed it, for there were in the service of the Company not a few men admirably qualified for the duty, whose scientific services had received scant appreciation. Nevertheless, the expedition started after all, with the approval of Colonel Sabine, the president. In the last months of 1866, Huxley drew up for the Royal Society a report upon the scientific value of the results of the expedition.] Don Roderigo is very wroth at being made responsible with Sabine, and indeed I think he had little enough to do with it.

You will see a letter from him in this week's "Athenaeum."

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.