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.