I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for theirs. There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were the blackest heretics out of the list proposed, and that he was glad to assent to your being doctored, when he got back, in order to keep out seven devils worse than that first!
Ever, oh Coryphaeus diabolicus, your faithful follower,
T.H. Huxley.
[The choice of a subject for his Presidential Address at the British Association for 1870, a subject which, as he put it,] "has lain chiefly in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and mouldiness," [was suggested by a recent controversy upon the origin of life, in which the experiments of Dr. Bastian, then Professor of Pathological Anatomy at University College, London, which seemed to prove spontaneous generation, were shown by Professor Tyndall to contain a flaw. Huxley had naturally been deeply interested from the first; he had been consulted by Dr. Bastian, and, I believe, had advised him not to publish until he had made quite sure of his ground. This question and the preparation of the course of Elementary Biology [See below.] led him to carry on a series of investigations lasting over two years, which took shape in a paper upon "Penicillium, Torula, and Bacterium", first read in Section D at the British Association, 1870 ("Quarterly Journal of Micr. Science" 1870 10 pages 355-362.); and in his article on "Yeast" in the "Contemporary Review" for December 1871. He laboriously repeated Pasteur's experiments, and for years a quantity of flasks and cultures used in this work remained at South Kensington, until they were destroyed in the eighties. Of this work Sir J. Hooker writes to him:—
You have made an immense leap in the association of forms, and I cannot but suppose you approach the final solution…
I have always fancied that it was rather brains and boldness, than eyes or microscopes that the mycologists wanted, and that there was more brains in Berkeley's [Reverend M.J. Berkeley.] crude discoveries than in the very best of the French and German microscopic verifications of them, who filch away the credit of them from under Berkeley's nose, and pooh-pooh his reasoning, but for which we should be, as we were.
In his Presidential Address, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis" ("Collected Essays" 8 page 229), he discussed the rival theories of spontaneous generation and the universal derivation of life from precedent life, and professed his belief, as an act of philosophic faith, that at some remote period, life had arisen out of inanimate matter, though there was no evidence that anything of the sort had occurred recently, the germ theory explaining many supposed cases of spontaneous generation. The history of the subject, indeed, showed] "the great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact—which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers," and recalled the warning "that it is one thing to refute a proposition, and another to prove the truth of a doctrine which, implicitly or explicitly, contradicts that proposition."
[Two letters to Dr. Dohrn refer to this address and to the meeting of the Association.]
Jermyn Street, April 30, 1870.
My dear Whirlwind,