I am really afraid that my own virtue might yield if so tempted!
Jesting apart, I heartily wish your plans success, and if there are any more definite ways in which I can help, let me know, and I will do my best. You will want, I should think, a physical and a philological committee to organise schemes: (1) for systematic measuring, weighing, and portraiture, with observation and recording of all physical characters; and (2) for uniform registering of sounds by Roman letters and collection of vocabularies and grammatical forms upon an uniform system.
I should advise you to look into the Museum of the Societe d'Anthropologie of Paris, and to put yourself in communication with M. Paul Broca, one of its most active members, who has lately been organising a scheme of general anthropological instructions. But don't have anything to do with the quacks who are at the head of the "Anthropological Society" over here. If they catch scent of what you are about they will certainly want to hook on to you.
Once more I wish I had the chance of being able to visit your congress. I have been lecturing on Ethnology this year [As Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution.], and shall be again this year, and I would give a good deal to be able to look at the complex facts of Indian Ethnology with my own eyes.
But as the sage observed, "what's impossible can't be," and what with short holidays—a wife and seven children—and miles of work in arrear, India is an impossibility for me.
You say nothing about yourself, so I trust you are well and hearty, and all your belongings flourishing.
Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[In paleontology he published this year papers on the "Vertebrate Remains from the Jarrow Colliery, Kilkenny;" on a new "Telerpeton from Elgin," and on some "Dinosaurs from South Africa." The latter, and many more afterwards, were sent over by a young man named Alfred Brown, who had a curious history. A Quaker gentleman came across him when employed in cleaning tools in Cirencester College, found that he was a good Greek and Latin scholar, and got him a tutorship in a clergyman's family at the Cape. He afterwards entered the postal service, and being inspired with a vivid interest in geology, spent all the leave he could obtain from his office on the Orange River in getting fossils from the Stormberg Rocks. These, as often as he could afford to send such weighty packages, he sent to Sir R. Murchison, to whom he had received a letter of introduction from his official superior. Sir Roderick, writing to Huxley, says "that he was proud of his new recruit," to whom he sent not only welcome words of encouragement, but the no less welcome news that the brother of his "discoverer," hearing of the facts from Professor Woodward, offered to defray his expenses so that he could collect regularly.
On April 2 Huxley was in Edinburgh to receive the first academic distinction conferred upon him in Britain. He received the honorary degree of the University in company with Tyndall and Carlyle. It was part of the fitness of things that he should be associated in this honour with his close friend Tyndall; but though he frequently acknowledged his debt to Carlyle as the teacher who in his youth had inspired him with his undying hatred of shams and humbugs of every kind, and whom he had gratefully come to know in after days, Carlyle did not forgive the publication of "Man's Place in Nature." Years after, near the end of his life, my father saw him walking slowly and alone down the opposite side of the street, and touched by his solitary appearance, crossed over and spoke to him. The old man looked at him, and merely remarking, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are all descended from monkeys," went on his way.