I heartily concur in the course you have taken, and had I been placed as you have been, would have done exactly the same…Your way of proceeding was as true an act of friendship as any that could be performed. As to myself, I dream so little about medals, that the notion of being on the list never entered my brain, even when asleep. If it ever comes I shall be pleased and thankful; if it does not, it is not the sort of thing to break my equanimity. Indeed, I would always like to see it given not as a mere honour, but as a help to a good man, and this it is assuredly in Hooker's case. Government people are so ignorant that they require to have merits drummed into their heads by all possible means, and Hooker's getting the medal may be of real service to him before long. I am in a snug, though not an idle nest,—he has not got his resting-place yet. And so, my dear Huxley, I trust that you know me too well to think that I am either grieved or envious, and you, Hooker, and I are much of the same way of thinking.
It is interesting to record the same scrupulosity over the election to the Registrarship of the University of London in 1856, when, having begun to canvass for Dr. Latham before his friend Dr. W.B. Carpenter entered the field, he writes to Hooker:—]
I at once, of course told Carpenter precisely what I had done. Had I known of his candidature earlier, I should certainly have taken no active part on either side—not for Latham, because I would not oppose Carpenter, and not for Carpenter, because his getting the Registrarship would probably be an advantage for me, as I should have a good chance of obtaining the Examinership in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy which he would vacate. Indeed, I refused to act for Carpenter in a case in which he asked me to do so, partly for this reason and partly because I felt thoroughly committed to Latham. Under these circumstances I think you are quite absolved from any pledge to me. It's deuced hard to keep straight in this wicked world, but as you say the only chance is to out with it, and I thank you much for writing so frankly about the matter. I hope it will be as fine as to-day at Down. [(Charles Darwin's home in Kent.)
Unfortunately the method was not so successful with smaller minds. Once in 1852, when he had to report unfavourably on a paper for the "Annals of Natural History" on the structure of the Starfishes, sent in by an acquaintance, he felt it right not to conceal his action, as he might have done, behind the referee's usual screen of anonymity, but to write a frank account of the reasons which had led him so to report, that he might both clear himself of the suspicion of having dealt an unfair blow in the dark, and give his acquaintance the opportunity of correcting and enlarging his paper with a view of submitting it again for publication.
In this case the only result was an impassioned correspondence, the author even going so far as to suggest that Huxley had condemned the paper without having so much as dissected an Echinoderm in his life! and then all intercourse ceased, till years afterwards the gentleman in question realised the weaknesses of his paper and repented him of his wrath.
Before leaving London to begin his work at Tenby as Naturalist to the Survey, he delivered at St. Martin's Hall, on July 22, an address on the "Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences. (The subsequent reference is to the words, "I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, to be corrected by and by." ("Collected Essays" 3 page 62.) This essay contains the definition of science as "trained and organised common sense," and the reference to a new "Peter Bell" which suggested Miss May Kendall's spirited parody of Wordsworth:—
Primroses by the river's brim
Dicotyledons were to him,
And they were nothing more.)
This, when it came out later as a pamphlet, he sent to his Tenby friend Dr. Dyster (of whom hereafter), to whose criticism on one passage he replied on October 10:—]
…I am rejoiced you liked my speechment. It was written hastily and is, like its speaker, I fear, more forcible than eloquent, but it can lay claim to the merit of being sincere.
My intention on page 28 was by no means to express any satisfaction at the worms being as badly off as ourselves, but to show that pain being everywhere is inevitable, and therefore like all other inevitable things to be borne. The rest of it is the product of my scientific Calvinism, which fell like a shell at your feet when we were talking over the fire.