I returned by Aosta, the great St. Bernard, and the Col de Balme. Old Simond was quite affectionate in his discourse about you, and seemed quite unhappy because you would not borrow his money. He had received your remittance, and asked me to tell you so. He was distressed at having forgotten to get a certificate from you, so I said in mine I was quite sure you were well satisfied with him.
On our journey he displayed his characteristic qualities, Je ne sais pas being the usual answer to any topographical inquiries with a total absence of nerve, and a general conviction that distances were very great and that the weather would be bad. However, we got on very well, and I was sorry to part with him.
I came home by way of Neuchatel, paying a visit to the Pierre a Bot, which I have long wished to see. My financial calculations were perfect in theory, but nearly broke down in practice, inasmuch as I was twice obliged to travel first-class when I calculated on second. The result was that my personal expenses between Paris and London amounted to 1.50!! and I arrived at my own house hungry and with a remainder of a few centimes. I should think that your fate must have been similar.
Many thanks for writing to my wife. She sends her kindest remembrances to you.
Ever yours,
T.H.H.
[The year 1857 was the last in which Huxley apparently had time to go so far in journal-writing as to draw up a balance-sheet at the year's end of work done and work undone. Though he finds] "as usual a lamentable difference between agenda and acta; many things proposed to be done not done, and many things not thought of finished," [still there is enough noted to satisfy most energetic people. Mention has already been made of his lectures—sixty-six at Jermyn Street, twelve Fullerian, and as many more to prepare for the next year's course; seven to working men, and one at the Royal Institution, together with the rearrangement of specimens at the Jermyn Street Museum, and the preparation of the Explanatory Catalogue, which this year was published to the extent of the Introduction and the Tertiary collections. To these may be added examinations at the London University, where he had succeeded Dr. Carpenter as examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in 1856, reviews, translations, a report on Deep Sea Soundings, and ten scientific memoirs.
The most important of the unfinished work consists of the long-delayed "Oceanic Hydrozoa," the "Manual of Comparative Anatomy," and a report on Fisheries. The rest of the unfinished programme shows the usual commixture of technical studies in anatomy and paleontology, with essays on the philosophical and educational bearings of his work. On the one hand are memoirs of Daphnia, Nautilus, and the Herring, the affinities of the Paleozoic Crustacea, the Ascidian Catalogue and Positive Histology; on the other, the Literature of the Drift, a review of the present state of philosophical anatomy, and a scheme for arranging the Explanatory Catalogue to serve as an introductory textbook to the Jermyn Street lectures and the paleontological demonstrations. Here, too, would fall a proposed "Letter on the Study of Comparative Anatomy," to do for those subjects what Henslow had done in his "Letter" for Botany.
In addition to the fact of his being forced to take up Paleontology, it was perhaps the philosophic breadth of view with which he regarded his subject at any time, and the desire of getting to the bottom of each subsidiary problem arising from it, that made him for many years seem constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly off at a tangent from the line in which he was assured of unrivalled success did he but devote to it his undivided powers. But he was prepared to endure the charge of desultoriness with equanimity. In part, he was still studying the whole field of biological science before he would claim to be a master in one department; in part, he could not yet tell to what post he might succeed when he left—as he fully expected to leave—the Professorship at Jermyn Street.
One characteristic of his early papers should not pass unnoticed. This was his familiarity with the best that had been written on his subjects abroad as well as in England. Thoroughness in this respect was rendered easier by the fact that he read French and German with almost as much facility as his mother tongue. "It is true, of course, that scientific men read French and German before the time of Huxley; but the deliberate consultation of all the authorities available has been maintained in historical succession since Huxley's earliest papers, and was absent in the papers of his early contemporaries." (P. Chalmers Mitchell in "Natural Science" August 1895.)