Your news about the lower jaw made me burst out into such an exclamation that all the salle-a-manger heard me! I saw the fitness of the thing at once. The foramen and the shape of the condyle ought to have suggested it at once.
I have had a very pleasant trip, passing through Grindelwald, the Aar valley, and the Rhone valley, as far as here; but, up to the day before yesterday, my health remained very unsatisfactory, and I was terribly teased by the neuralgia or rheumatism or whatever it is.
On that day, however, I had a very sharp climb involving a great deal of exertion and a most prodigious sweating, and on the next morning I really woke up a new man. Yesterday I repeated the dose and I am in hopes now that I shall come back fit to grapple with all the work that lies before me.
Ever, my dear Flower, yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[This autumn he gladly took on what appeared to be an additional piece of work. On October 12 he writes from 26 Abbey Place:—]
I saw Flower yesterday, and I find that my present colleague in the Hunterian Professorship wishes to get rid of his share in the lectures, having, I suppose, at the eleventh hour discovered his incompetency. It looks paradoxical to say so, but it will really be easier for me to give eighteen or twenty-four lectures than twelve, so that I have professed my readiness to take as much as he likes off his hands.
[This Professorship had been in existence for more than sixty years, for when the Museum of the famous anatomist John Hunter was entrusted to the College of Surgeons by the Government, the condition was made that "one course of lectures, not less than twenty-four in number, on comparative anatomy and other subjects, illustrated by the preparations, shall be given every year by some member of the company." Huxley arranged to publish from year to year the substance of his lectures on the vertebrates, "and by that process to bring out eventually a comprehensive, though condensed, systematic work on 'Comparative Anatomy'." ("Comparative Anatomy" volume 1 Preface.)
Of the labour entailed in this course, the late Sir W.H. Flower wrote:—
When, in 1862, he was appointed to the Hunterian Professorship at the College of Surgeons, he took for the subject of several yearly courses of lectures the anatomy of the vertebrata, beginning with the primates, and as the subject was then rather new to him, and as it was a rule with him never to make a statement in a lecture which was not founded upon his own actual observation, he set to work to make a series of original dissections of all the forms he treated of. These were carried on in the workroom at the top of the college, and mostly in the evenings, after his daily occupation at Jermyn Street (the School of Mines, as it was then called) was over, an arrangement which my residence in the college buildings enabled me to make for him. These rooms contained a large store of material, entire or partially dissected animals preserved in spirit, which, unlike those mounted in the museum, were available for further investigation in any direction, and these, supplemented occasionally by fresh subjects from the Zoological Gardens, formed the foundation of the lectures…On these evenings it was always my privilege to be with him, and to assist in the work in which he was engaged. In dissecting, as in everything else, he was a very rapid worker, going straight to the point he wished to ascertain with a firm and steady hand, never diverted into side issues, nor wasting any time in unnecessary polishing up for the sake of appearances; the very opposite, in fact, to what is commonly known as "finikin." His great facility for bold and dashing sketching came in most usefully in this work, the notes he made being largely helped out with illustrations.