CHAPTER 2.4.
1873.
[The year opens with a letter to Tyndall, then on a lecturing tour in
America:—]
4 Marlborough Place, Abbey Road, N.W., January 1, 1872 [1873].
My dear Tyndall,
I cannot let this day go by without wishing you a happy New Year, and lamenting your absence from our customary dinner. But Hirst and Spencer and Michael Foster are coming, and they shall drink your health in champagne while I do the like in cold water, making up by the strength of my good wishes for the weakness of the beverage.
You see I write from the new house. Getting into it was an awful job, made worse than needful by the infamous weather we have had for weeks and months, and by the stupid delays of the workmen, whom we had fairly to shove out at last as we came in. We are settling down by degrees, and shall be very comfortable by and by, though I do not suppose that we shall be able to use the drawing-room for two or three months to come. I am very glad to have made the change, but there is a drawback to everything in "this here wale," as Mrs. Gamp says and my present thorn in the flesh is a neighbour, who says I have injured him by certain operations in my garden, and is trying to get something out of me by Chancery proceedings. Fancy finding myself a defendant in Chancery!
It is particularly hard on me, as I have been especially careful to have nothing done without Burton's sanction and assurance that I was quite safe in law; and I would have given up anything [rather] than have got into bother of this kind. But "sich is life."
You seem to have been making a Royal Progress in Yankee-land. We have been uncommonly tickled with some of the reports of your lectures which reached us, especially with that which spoke of your having "a strong English accent."
The loss of your assistant seems to have been the only deduction to be made from your success. I am afraid you must have felt it much in all ways.
"My Lord" received your telegram only after the business of "securing Hirst" was done. That is one of the bright spots in a bad year for me. Goschen consulted Spottiswood and me independently about the headship of the new Naval College, and was naturally considerably surprised by the fact that we coincided in recommending Hirst…The upshot was that Goschen asked me to communicate with Hirst and see if he would be disposed to accept the offer. So I did, and found to my great satisfaction that Hirst took to the notion very kindly. I am sure he is the very best man for the post to be met with in the three kingdoms, having that rare combination of qualities by which he gets on with all manner of men, and singularly attracts young fellows. He will not only do his duty, but be beloved for doing it, which is what few people can compass.
I have little news to give you. The tail of the X.-Hooker storm is drifting over the scientific sky in the shape of fresh attacks by Owen on Hooker. Hooker answered the last angelically, and I hope they are at an end.
The wife has just come in and sends her love (but is careful to add "second-best"). The chicks grow visibly and audibly, and Jess looks quite a woman. All are well except myself, and I am getting better from a fresh breakdown of dyspepsia. I find that if I am to exist at all it must be on strictly ascetic principles, so there is hope of my dying in the odour of sanctity yet. If you recollect, Lancelot did not know that he should "die a holy man" till rather late in life. I have forgotten to tell you about the Rectorship of Aberdeen. I refused to stand at first, on the score of health, and only consented on condition that I should not be called upon to do any public work until after the long vacation. It was a very hard fight, and although I had an absolute majority of over fifty, the mode of election is such that one vote, in one of the four nations, would have turned the scale by giving my opponent the majority in that nation. We should then have been ties, and as the chancellor, who has under such circumstances a casting vote, would have (I believe) given it against me, I should have been beaten.
As it is, the fact of any one, who stinketh in the nostrils of orthodoxy, beating a Scotch peer at his own gates in the most orthodox of Scotch cities, is a curious sign of the times. The reason why they made such a tremendous fight for me, is I believe, that I may carry on the reforms commenced by Grant Duff, my predecessor. Unlike other Lord Rectors, he of Aberdeen is a power and can practically govern the action of the University during his tenure of office.
I saw Pollock yesterday, and he says that they want you back again. Curiously the same desire is epidemically prevalent among your friends, not least here.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[In spite of his anxieties, his health was slowly improving under careful regimen. He published no scientific memoirs this year, but in addition to his regular lectures, he was working to finish his "Manual of Invertebrate Anatomy" and his "Introductory Primer," and to write his Aberdeen address; he was also at work upon the "Pedigree of the Horse" and on "Bodily Motion and Consciousness." He delivered a course to teachers on Psychology and Physiology, and was much occupied by the Royal Commission on Science. As a governor of Owens College he had various meetings to attend, though his duties did not extend, as some of his friends seem to have thought, to the appointment of a Professor of Physiology there.]
My life (he writes to Sir Henry Roscoe) is becoming a burden to me because of —. Why I do not know, but for some reason people have taken it into their heads that I have something to do with appointments in Owens College, and no fewer than three men of whose opinion I think highly have spoken or written to me urging —'s merits very strongly.
[This summer he again took a long holiday, thanks to the generosity of his friends, and with better results. He went with his old friend Hooker to the Auvergne, walking, geologising, sketching, and gradually discarding doctor's orders. Sir Joseph Hooker has very kindly written me a letter from which I give an account of this trip:—
It was during the many excursions we took together, either by ourselves or with one of my boys, that I knew him best at his best: and especially during one of several weeks' duration in the summer of 1873, which we spent in central France and Germany. He had been seriously ill, and was suffering from severe mental depression. For this he was ordered abroad by his physician, Sir A. Clark, to which step he offered a stubborn resistance. With Mrs. Huxley's approval, and being myself quite in the mood for a holiday, I volunteered to wrestle with him, and succeeded, holding out as an inducement a visit to the volcanic region of the Auvergne with Scrope's classical volume, which we both knew and admired, as a guide book.
We started on July 2nd, I loaded with injunctions from his physician as to what his patient was to eat, drink, and avoid, how much he was to sleep and rest, how little to talk and walk, etc., that would have made the expedition a perpetual burthen to me had I not believed that I knew enough of my friend's disposition and ailments to be convinced that not only health but happiness would be our companions throughout. Sure enough, for the first few days, including a short stay in Paris, his spirits were low indeed, but this gave me the opportunity of appreciating his remarkable command over himself and his ever-present consideration for his companion. Not a word or gesture of irritation ever escaped him; he exerted himself to obey the instructions laid down; nay, more, he was instant in his endeavour to save me trouble at hotels, railway stations, and ticket offices. Still, some mental recreation was required to expedite recovery, and he found it first by picking up at a bookstall, a "History of the Miracles of Lourdes," which were then exciting the religious fervour of France, and the interest of her scientific public. He entered with enthusiasm into the subject, getting together all the treatises upon it, favourable or the reverse, that were accessible, and I need hardly add, soon arrived at the conclusion, that the so-called miracles were in part illusions and for the rest delusions. As it may interest some of your readers to know what his opinion was in this early stage of the manifestations, I will give it as he gave it to me. It was a case of two peasant children sent in the hottest month of the year into a hot valley to collect sticks for firewood washed up by a stream, when one of them after stooping down opposite a heat-reverberating rock, was, in rising, attacked with a transient vertigo, under which she saw a figure in white against the rock. This bare fact being reported to the cure of the village, all the rest followed.
Soon after our arrival at Clermont Ferrand, your father had so far recovered his wonted elasticity of spirits that he took a keen interest in everything around, the museums, the cathedral, where he enjoyed the conclusion of the service by a military band which gave selections from the Figlia del Regimento, but above all he appreciated the walks and drives to the geological features of the environs. He reluctantly refrained from ascending the Puy de Dome, but managed the Pic Parion, Gergovia, Royat, and other points of interest without fatigue…
After Clermont they visited the other four great volcanic areas explored by Scrope, Mont Dore, the Cantal, Le Puy, and the valley of the Ardeche. Under the care of his friend, and relieved from the strain of work, my father's health rapidly improved. He felt no bad effects from a night at Mont Dore, when, owing to the crowd of invalids in the little town, no better accommodation could be found than a couple of planks in a cupboard. Next day they took up their quarters in an unpretentious cabaret at La Tour d'Auvergne, one of the villages on the slopes of the mountain, a few miles away.
Here (writes Sir J. Hooker), and for some time afterwards, on our further travels, we had many interesting and amusing experiences of rural life in the wilder parts of central France, its poverty, penury, and too often its inconceivable impositions and overcharges to foreigners, quite consistently with good feeling, politeness, and readiness to assist in many ways.
By the 10th of July, nine days after setting out, I felt satisfied (he continues) that your father was equal to an excursion upon which he had set his heart, to the top of the Pic de Sancy, 4000 feet above La Tour and 7 miles distant.
It was on this occasion that the friends made what they thought a new discovery, namely evidence of glacial action in central France. Besides striated stones in the fields or built into the walls, they noticed the glaciated appearance of one of the valleys descending from the peak, and especially some isolated gigantic masses of rock on an open part of the valley, several miles away, as to which they debated whether they were low buildings or transported blocks. Sir Joseph visited them next day, and found they were the latter, brought down from the upper part of the peak. (He published an account of these blocks in "Nature" 8 31, 166, but subsequently found that glaciation had been observed by von Lassaul in 1872 and by Sir William Guise in 1870.)
Lepuy offered a special attraction apart from scenery and geology. In the museum was the skeleton of a prehistoric man that had been found in the breccia of the neighbourhood, associated with the remains of the rhinoceros, elephant, and other extinct mammals. My father's sketch-book contains drawings of these bones and of the ravine where they were discovered, although in spite of directions from M. Aymard, the curator, he could not find the exact spot. Under the sketch is a description of the remains, in which he notes,] "The bones do not look fresher than some of those of Elephas and Rhinoceros in the same or adjacent cases."
[As for the final stage of the excursion:—
After leaving the Ardeche (continues Sir J. Hooker), with no Scrope to lead or follow, our scientific ardours collapsed. We had vague views as to future travel. Whatever one proposed was unhesitatingly acceded to by the other. A more happy-go-lucky pair of idlers never joined company.
As will be seen from the following letters, they made their way to the Black Forest, where they stayed till Sir Joseph's duties called him back to England, and my mother came out to join my father for the rest of his holiday. (You ask me (Sir Joseph adds) whether your father smoked on the occasion of this tour. Yes, he did, cigars in moderation. But the history of his addiction to tobacco that grew upon him later in life, dates from an earlier excursion that we took together, and I was the initiator of the practice. It happened in this wise; he had been suffering from what was supposed to be gastric irritation, and, being otherwise "run down," we agreed to go, in company with Sir John Lubbock, on a tour to visit the great monoliths of Brittany. This was in 1867. On arriving at Dinan he suffered so much, that I recommended his trying a few cigarettes which I had with me. They acted as a charm, and this led to cigars, and finally, about 1875 I think, to the pipe. That he subsequently carried the use of tobacco to excess is, I think, unquestionable. I repeatedly remonstrated with him, at last I think (by backing his medical adviser) with effect.
I have never blamed myself for the "teaching him" to smoke, for the practice habitually palliated his distressing symptoms when nothing else did, nor can his chronic illness be attributed to the abuse of tobacco.)
The following letters to Sir H. Roscoe and Dr. Tyndall were written during this tour:—]
Le Puy, Haute Loire, France, July 17, 1873.
My dear Roscoe,
Your very kind letter reached me just as I was in the hurry of getting away from England, and I have been carrying it about in my pocket ever since.
Hooker and I have been having a charming time of it among the volcanoes of the Auvergne, and we are now on our way to those of the Velay and Vivarrais. The weather has been almost perfect. Perhaps a few degrees of temperature could have been spared now and then, especially at Clermont, of which somebody once said that having stayed there the climate of hell would have no terrors for him.
It has been warm in the Mont Dore country and in the Cantal, as it is here, but we are very high up, and there is a charming freshness and purity about the air.
I do not expect to be back before the end of September, and my lectures begin somewhere in the second week of October. After they commence I shall not be able to leave London even for a day, but I shall be very glad to come to the inauguration of your new buildings if the ceremony falls within my possible time. And you know I am always glad to be your guest.
I am thriving wonderfully. Indeed all that plagues me now is my conscience, for idling about when I feel full of vigour. But I promised to be obedient, and I am behaving better than Auld Clootie did when he fell sick.
I hope you are routing out the gout. This would be the place for you—any quantity of mineral waters.
Pray remember me very kindly to Mrs. Roscoe, and believe me, ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Hotel de France, Baden-Baden, July 30, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
We find ourselves here after a very successful cruise in the Auvergne and Ardeche, successful at least so far as beauty and geological interest go. The heat was killing, and obliged us to give up all notion of going to Ursines, as we had at first intended to do. So we turned our faces north and made for Grenoble, hoping for a breath of cool air from the mountains of Dauphiny. But Grenoble was hotter even than Clermont (which, by the way, quite deserves its reputation as a competitor with hell), a neighbour's drains were adrift close to the hotel, and we got poisoned before we could escape. Luckily we got off with nothing worse than a day or two's diarrhoea. After this the best thing seemed to be to rush northward to Gernsbach, which had been described to me as a sort of earthly paradise. We reached the place last Saturday night, and found ourselves in a big rambling hotel, crammed full of people, and planted in the bottom of a narrow valley, all hot and steaming. A large pigstye "convenient" to the house mingled its vapours with those of the seventy or eighty people who ate and drank without any other earthly occupation that we could discern during the three days we were bound, by stress of letters and dirty linen, to stop. On Monday we made an excursion over here, prospecting, and the air was so fresh and good, and things in general looked so promising that I made up my mind to put up in Baden-Baden until the wife joins me. She writes me that you talk of leaving England on Friday, and I may remark that Baden is on the high road to Switzerland. Verbum sap.
I am wonderfully better, and really feel ashamed of loafing about when I might very well be at work. But I have promised to make holiday, and make holiday I will.
No proof of your answer to Forbes' biographer reached me before I left, so I suppose you had not received one in time. I am dying to see it out.
Hooker is down below, but I take upon myself to send his love. He is in great force now that he has got rid of his Grenoble mulligrubs.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[After parting company with Hooker, he paid a flying visit to Professor Bonnet at Geneva; then he was joined by his wife and son for the last three weeks of the holiday, which were spent at Baden and in the Bernese Oberland. Before this, he writes home:—]
I feel quite a different man from what I was two months ago, and you will say that you have a much more creditable husband than the broken-down old fellow who has been a heart-ache to you so long, when you see me. The sooner you can get away the better. If the rest only does you as much good as it does me, I shall be very happy.
Axenstein, Luzerne, August 24, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
The copies of your booklet ["Principal Forbes and his Biographers.">[ intended for Hooker and me reached me just as I left Baden last Tuesday. Hooker had left me for home a fortnight before, and I hardly know whether to send his to Kew or keep them for him till I return. I have read mine twice, and I think that nothing could be better than the tone you have adopted. I did not suspect that you had such a shot in your locker as the answer to Forbes about the direction of the "crevasses" referred to by Rendu. It is a deadly thrust; and I shall be curious to see what sort of parry the other side will attempt. For of course they will attempt something. Scotland is, I believe, the only country in the world in which you can bring in action for "putting to silence" an adversary who will go on with an obviously hopeless suit. The lawgivers knew the genius of the people; and it is to be regretted that they could not establish a process of the same sort in scientific matters.
I wrote to you a month ago to tell you how we had been getting on in France. Hooker and I were very jolly, notwithstanding the heat, and I think that the Vivarrais is the most instructive country in the world for seeing what water can do in cutting down the hardest rocks. Scrope's book is very good on the whole, though the pictures are a little overdone.
My wife and Leonard met me at Cologne on the 11th. Then we went on to Baden and rested till last Tuesday, when we journeyed to Luzerne and, getting out of that hot and unsavoury hole as fast as we could, came here last Thursday.
We find ourselves very well off. The hotel is perched up 1800 feet above the lake, with a beautiful view of Pilatus on the west and of the Urner See on the south. On the north we have the Schwyz valley, so that we are not shut in, and the air is very good and fresh. There are plenty of long walks to be had without much fatigue, which suits the wife. Leonard promises to have very good legs of his own with plenty of staying power. I have given him one or two sharp walks, and I find he has plenty of vigour and endurance. But he is not thirteen yet and I do not mean to let him do overmuch, though we are bent on a visit to a glacier. I began to tell him something about the glaciers the other day, but I was promptly shut up with, "Oh, yes! I know all about that. It's in Dr. Tyndall's book."—which said book he seems to me to have got by heart. He is the sweetest little fellow imaginable; and either he has developed immensely in the course of the last year, or I have never been so much thrown together with him alone, and have not had the opportunity of making him out.
You are a fatherly old bachelor, and will not think me a particularly great donkey for prattling on in this way about my swan, who probably to unprejudiced eyes has a power of goose about him.
I suppose you know that in company with yourself and Hooker, the paternal gander (T.H.H.) has been honoured by the King of Sweden and made into a Polar Goose by the order of the North Star. Hooker has explained to the Swedish Ambassador that English officials are prohibited by order in Council from accepting foreign orders, and I believe keeps the cross and ribbon on these conditions. If it were an ordinary decoration I should decline with thanks, but I am told it is a purely scientific and literary affair like the Prussian "pour le merite"; so when I get back I shall follow Hooker's line.
I met Laugel on board the Luzerne steamboat the other day, and he told me that you were at the Belalp—gallivanting as usual, and likely to remain there for some time. So I send this on the chance of finding you.
With best love from us all, ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
I am as well as I ever was in my life—regularly set up—in token whereof I have shaved off my beard.
[In another letter to his wife, dated August 8, from Baden, there is a very interesting passage about himself and his aims. He has just been speaking about his son's doings at school:—]
I have been having a great deal of talk with myself about my future career too, and I have often thought over what you say in the letter you wrote to the Puy. I don't quite understand what — meant about the disputed reputation, unless it is a reputation for getting into disputes. But to say truth I am not greatly concerned about any reputation except that of being entirely honest and straightforward, and that reputation I think and hope I have.
For the rest…the part I have to play is not to found a new school of thought or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old schools. We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement. But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues vast political and social troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole. But this organisation will be the work of generations of men, and those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions. I may be able to help a little in this direction—perhaps I may have helped already. For the present, however, I am disposed to draw myself back entirely into my own branch of physical science. There is enough and to spare for me to do in that line, and, for years to come, I do not mean to be tempted out of it.
[Strangely enough, this was the one thing he was destined not to do. Official work multiplied about him. From 1870 to 1884 only two years passed without his serving on one or two Royal Commissions. He was Secretary of the Royal Society from 1871 to 1880, and President from 1883 to his retirement, owing to ill-health, in 1885. He became Dean as well as Professor of Biology in the College of Science, and Inspector of Fisheries. Though he still managed to find some time for anatomical investigations, and would steal a precious hour or half-hour by driving back from the Home Office to his laboratory at South Kensington before returning home to St. John's Wood, the amount of such work as he was able to publish could not be very great.
His most important contributions during this decennium (writes Sir M. Foster) were in part continuations of his former labours, such as the paper and subsequent full memoir on Stagonolepis, which appeared in 1875 and 1877, and papers on the Skull. The facts that he called a communication to the Royal Society, in 1875 (written 1874.), on Amphioxus, a preliminary note, and that a paper read to the Zoological Society in 1876, on Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked Number 1 of the series of Contributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before him the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when opportunity offered; but, alas! the opportunity which came was small, the preliminary note had no full successor, and Number 1 was only followed, and that after an interval of seven years, by a brief Number 2. A paper "On the Characters of the Pelvis," in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society," in 1879, is full of suggestive thought, but its concluding passages seem to suggest that others, and not he himself, were to carry out the ideas. Most of the papers of this decennium deal with vertebrate morphology, and are more or less connected with his former researches, but in one respect, at least, he broke quite fresh ground. He had chosen the crayfish as one of the lessons for the class in general biology spoken of above, and was thus drawn into an interesting study of crayfishes, by which he was led to a novel and important analysis of the gill plumes as evidence of affinity and separation. He embodied the main results of his studies in a paper to the Zoological Society, and treated the whole subject in a more popular style in a book on the Crayfish. In a somewhat similar way, having taken the dog as an object lesson in mammalian anatomy for his students, he was led to a closer study of that common animal, resulting in papers on that subject to the Zoological Society in 1880, and in two lectures at the Royal Institution in 1880. He had intended so to develop this study of the dog as to make it tell the tale of mammalian morphology; but this purpose, too, remained unaccomplished.
Moreover, though he sent one paper (on Hyperodapedon Gordoni) to the Geological Society as late as 1887, yet the complete breakdown of his health in 1885, which released him from nearly all his official duties, at the same time dulled his ardour for anatomical pursuits. Stooping over his work became an impossibility.
Though he carried about him, as does every man of like calibre and experience, a heavy load of fragments of inquiry begun but never finished, and as heavy a load of ideas for promising investigations never so much as even touched, though his love of science and belief in it might never have wavered, though he never doubted the value of the results which further research would surely bring him, there was something working within him which made his hand, when turned to anatomical science, so heavy that he could not lift it. Not even that which was so strong within him, the duty of fulfilling a promise, could bring him to the work. In his room at South Kensington, where for a quarter of a century he had laboured with such brilliant effect, there lay on his working table for months, indeed for years, partly dissected specimens of the rare and little studied marine animal, Spirula, of which he had promised to contribute an account to the Reports of the "Challenger" Expedition, and hard by lay the already engraven plates; there was still wanted nothing more than some further investigation and the working out of the results. But it seemed as if some hidden hands were always being stretched out to keep him from the task; and eventually another labourer had to complete it. (Ibid.)
The remaining letters of this year include several to Dr. Dohrn, which show the continued interest my father took in the great project of the Biological Station at Naples, which was carried through in spite of many difficulties. He had various books and proceedings of learned societies sent out at Dr. Dohrn's request (I omit the details), and proposed a scheme for raising funds towards completing the building when the contractor failed. The scheme, however, was not put into execution.]
4 Marlborough Place, February 24, 1873.
My dear Dohrn,
I was very glad to receive the fine sealed letter, and to get some news of you—though to be sure there is not much of you in the letter, but all is "Station, Station."
I congratulate you heartily on your success with your undertaking, and I only wish I could see England represented among the applicants for tables. But you see England is so poor, and the present price of coals obliges her to economise.
I envy you your visit from "Pater Anchises" Baer, and rejoice to hear that the grand old man is well and strong enough to entertain such a project. I wish I could see my way to doing the like. I have had a long bout of illness—ever since August—but I am now very much better, indeed, I hope I may say quite well. The weariness of all this has been complicated by the trouble of getting into a new house, and in addition a lawsuit brought by a knavish neighbour, in the hope of extracting money out of me.
I am happy to say, however, that he has just been thoroughly and effectually defeated. It has been a new experience for me, and I hope it may be my last as well as my first acquaintance with English law, which is a luxury of the most expensive character.
If Dr. Kleinenberg is with you, please to tell him, with my compliments and thanks for the copy of his Memoir, that I went over his Hydra paper pretty carefully in the summer, and satisfied myself as to the correctness of his statements about the structure of the ectoderm and about the longitudinal fibres. About the Endoderm I am not so clear, and I often found indications of delicate circular fibres in close apposition with the longitudinal ones. However, I had not time to work all this out, and perhaps might as well say nothing about it.
Pray make my very kind remembrances to Mr. Grant. I trust that his dramas may have a brilliant reception.
The Happy Family flourishes. But we shall look to your coming to see us. The house is big enough now to give you a bedroom, and you know you will have no lack of welcome.
I have said nothing about my wife (who has been in a state not only of superhuman, but of superfeminine, activity for the last three months) meaning to leave her the last page to speak for herself.
With best compliments to the "ladies downstairs," ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
4 Marlborough Place, October 17, 1873.
My dear Dohrn,
Your letter reached me nearly a week ago, and I have been turning over its contents in my mind as well as I could, but have been able to come to no clear conclusion until now. I have been incessantly occupied with other things.
I will do for you, and gladly, anything I would do for myself, but I could not apply on my own behalf to any of those rich countrymen of mine, unless they were personally well known to me, and I had the opportunity of feeling my way with them. But if you are disposed to apply to any of the people you mention, I shall be only too glad to back your application with all the force I am master of. You may make use of my name to any extent as guarantor of the scientific value and importance of your undertaking and refer any one to whom you may apply to me. It may be, in fact, that this is all you want, but as you have taken to the caprice of writing in my tongue instead of in that vernacular, idiomatic and characteristically Dohrnian German in which I delight, I am not so sure about your meaning. There is a rub for you. If you write to me in English again I will send the letter back without paying the postage.
In any case let me have a precise statement of your financial position. I may have a chance of talking to some Croesus, and the first question he is sure to ask me is—How am I to know that this is a stable affair, and that I am not throwing my money into the sea?…
[Referring to an unpleasant step it seemed necessary to take]…you must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation…
I hope you are physically better. Look sharply after your diet, take exercise and defy the blue-devils, and you will weather the storm.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[Tyndall, who had not attended the 1873 meeting of the British Association, had heard that some local opposition had been offered to his election as President for the Belfast meeting in 1874, and had written:—
I wish to have an you had not persuaded me to accept that Belfast duty. They do not want me…but Spottiswoode assures me that no individual offered the slightest support to the two unscientific persons who showed opposition.
The following was written in reply:—]
4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
I am sure you are mistaken about the Belfast people. That blundering idiot of — wanted to make himself important and get up a sort of "Home Rule" agitation in the Association, but nobody backed him and he collapsed. I am at your disposition for whatever you want me to do, as you know, and I am sure Hooker is of the same mind. We shall not be ashamed when we meet our enemies in the gate.
The grace of god cannot entirely have deserted you since you are aware of the temperature of that ferocious epistle. Reeks [The late Trenham Reeks, Registrar of the School of Mines, and Curator of the Museum of Practical Geology.], whom I saw yesterday, was luxuriating in it, and said (confound his impudence) that it was quite my style. I forgot to tell him, by the bye, that I had resigned in your favour ever since the famous letter to Carpenter. Well, so long as you are better after it there is no great harm done.
Somebody has sent me the two numbers of Scribner with Blauvelt's articles on "Modern Skepticism." They seem to be very well done, and he has a better appreciation of the toughness of the job before him than any of the writers of his school with whom I have met. But it is rather cool of you to talk of his pitching into Spencer when you are chief target yourself. I come in only par parenthese, and I am glad to see that people are beginning to understand my real position, and to separate me from such raging infidels as you and Spencer.
Ever thine,
T.H. Huxley.
[He was unable to attend the opening of Owens College this autumn, and having received but a scanty account of the proceedings, wrote as follows:—]
4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., October 16, 1873.
My dear Roscoe,
I consider myself badly used. Nobody has sent me a Manchester paper with the proceedings of the day of inauguration, when, I hear, great speeches were made.
I DID get TWO papers containing your opening lecture, and the "Fragment of a Morality," for which I am duly grateful, but two copies of one days' proceedings are not the same thing as one copy of two days' proceedings, and I consider it is very disrespectful to a Governor (large G) not to let him know what went on.
By all accounts which have reached me it was a great success, and I congratulate you heartily. I only wish that I could have been there to see.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The autumn brought a slow improvement in health—]
I am travelling [he writes] between the two stations of dyspepsia and health thus [illustrated by a zigzag with "mean line ascending".
[The sympathy of the convalescent appears in various letters to friends who were ill. Thus, in reply to Mr. Hyde Clarke, the philologist and, like himself, a member of the Ethnological Society, he writes:—]
November 18, 1873.
I am glad to learn two things from your note—first, that you are getting better; second, that there is hope of some good coming out of that Ashantee row, if only in the shape of rare vocables.
My attention is quite turned away from Anthropological matters at present, but I will bear your question in mind if opportunity offers.
[A letter to Professor Rolleston at Oxford gives a lively account of his own ailments, which could only have been written by one now recovering from them, while the illness of another friend raised a delicate point of honour, which he laid before the judgment of Mr. Darwin, more especially as the latter had been primarily concerned in the case.]
4 Marlborough Place, October 16, 1873.
My dear Rolleston,
A note which came from Mrs. Rolleston to my wife the other day, kindly answering some inquiries of ours about the Oxford Middle Class Examination, gave us but a poor account of your health.
This kind of thing won't do, you know. Here is — ill, and I doing all I can to persuade him to go away and take care of himself, and now comes ill news of you.
Is it dyspeps again? If so follow in my steps. I mean to go about the country, with somebody who can lecture, as the "horrid example"—cured. Nothing but gross and disgusting intemperance, Sir, was the cause of all my evil. And now that I have been a teetotaller for nine months, and have cut down my food supply to about half of what I used to eat, the enemy is beaten.
I have carried my own permissive bill, and no canteen (except for my friends who still sit in darkness) is allowed on the premises. And as this is the third letter I have written before breakfast (a thing I never could achieve in the days when I wallowed in the stye of Epicurus), you perceive that I am as vigorous as ever I was in my life.
Let me have news of you, and believe me,
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Athenaeum Club, November 3, 1873.
My dear Darwin,
You will have heard (in fact I think I mentioned the matter when I paid you my pleasant visit the other day) that — is ill and obliged to go away for six months to a warm climate. It is a great grief to me, as he is a man for whom I have great esteem and affection, apart from his high scientific merits, and his symptoms are such as cause very grave anxiety. I shall be happily disappointed if that accursed consumption has not got hold of him.
The college authorities have behaved as well as they possibly could to him, and I do not suppose that his enforced retirement for a while gives him the least pecuniary anxiety, as his people are all well off, and he himself has an income apart from his college pay. Nevertheless, under such circumstances, a man with half a dozen children always wants all the money he can lay hands on; and whether he does or no, he ought not to be allowed to deprive himself of any, which leads me to the gist of my letter. His name was on your list as one of those hearty friends who came to my rescue last year, and it was the only name which made me a little uneasy, for I doubted whether it was right for a man with his responsibilities to make sacrifices of this sort. However, I stifled that feeling, not seeing what else I could do without wounding him. But now my conscience won't let me be, and I do not think that any consideration ought to deter me from getting his contribution back to him somehow or other. There is no one to whose judgment on a point of honour I would defer more readily than yours, and I am quite sure you will agree with me. I really am quite unhappy and ashamed to think of myself as vigorous and well at the expense of his denying himself any rich man's caprice he might take a fancy to.
So, my dear, good friend, let me know what his contribution was, that I may get it back to him somehow or other, even if I go like Nicodemus privily and by night to his bankers.
Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.