Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

My dear Darwin,

I was very glad to get your note about my address. I profess to be a great stoic, you know, but there are some people from whom I am glad to get a pat on the back. Still I am not quite content with that, and I want to know what you think of the argument—whether you agree with what I say about contemporaneity or not, and whether you are prepared to admit—as I think your views compel you to do—that the whole Geological Record is only the skimmings of the pot of life.

Furthermore, I want you to chuckle with me over the notion I find a great many people entertain—that the address is dead against your views. The fact being, as they will by and by wake up [to] see that yours is the only hypothesis which is not negatived by the facts,—one of its great merits being that it allows not only of indefinite standing still, but of indefinite retrogression.

I am going to try to work the whole argument into an intelligible form for the general public as a chapter in my forthcoming "Evidence" (one half of which I am happy to say is now written) ["Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.">[, so I shall be very glad of any criticisms or hints.

Since I saw you—indeed, from the following Tuesday onwards—I have amused myself by spending ten days or so in bed. I had an unaccountable prostration of strength which they called influenza, but which, I believe, was nothing but some obstruction in the liver.

Of course I can't persuade people of this, and they will have it that it is overwork. I have come to the conviction, however, that steady work hurts nobody, the real destroyer of hardworking men being not their work, but dinners, late hours, and the universal humbug and excitement of society.

I mean to get out of all that and keep out of it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The other contribution to the general question was his Working Men's Lectures for 1862. As he writes to Darwin on October 10—] "I can't find anything to talk to the working men about this year but your book. I mean to give them a commentary a la Coke upon Lyttleton."