[Tyndall was not to be outdone, and replied:—
The parsons know very well that I mean kindness; if I correct them I do it in love and not in wrath.
One more extract from a letter to Dr. Dohrn, under date of November 17. The first part is taken up with a long and detailed description of the best English microscopes and their price, for Dr. Dohrn wished to get one; and my father volunteered to procure it for him. The rest of the letter has a more general interest as giving his views on the great struggle between France and Germany then in progress, his distrust of militarism, and above all, his hatred of lying, political as much as any other:—]
This wretched war is doing infinite mischief; but I do not see what
Germany can do now but carry it out to the end.
I began to have some sympathy with the French after Sedan, but the Republic lies harder than the Empire did, and the whole country seems to me to be rotten to the core. The only figure which stands out with anything like nobility or dignity, on the French side, is that of the Empress, and she is only a second-rate Marie-Antoinette. There is no Roland, no Corday, and apparently no MAN of any description.
The Russian row is beginning, and the rottenness of English administration will soon, I suppose, have an opportunity of displaying itself. Bad days are, I am afraid, in store for all of us, and the worst for Germany if it once becomes thoroughly bitten by the military mad dog.
The "happy family" is flourishing and was afflicted, even over its breakfast, when I gave out the news that you had been ill.
The wife desires her best remembrances, and we all hope you are better.
[The high pressure under which Huxley worked, and his abundant output, continued undiminished through the autumn and winter. Indeed, he was so busy that he postponed his Lectures to Working Men in London from October to February 1871. On October 3 he lectured in Leicester on "What is to be Learned from a Piece of Coal," a parallel lecture to that of 1868 on "A Piece of Chalk." On the 17th and 24th he lectured at Birmingham on "Extinct Animals intermediate between Reptiles and Birds"—a subject which he had made peculiarly his own by long study; and on December 29 he was at Bradford, and lectured at the Philosophical Institute upon "The Formation of Coal" ("Collected Essays" 8.).
He was also busy with two Royal Commissions; still, at whatever cost of the energy and time due to his own investigations and those additional labours by which he increased his none too abundant income, he felt it his duty, in the interests of his ideal of education, to come forward as a candidate for the newly-instituted School Board for London. This was the practical outcome of the rising interest in education all over the country; on its working, he felt, depended momentous issues—the fostering of the moral and physical well-being of the nation; the quickening of its intelligence and the maintenance of its commercial supremacy. Withal, he desired to temper "book-learning" with something of the direct knowledge of nature: on the one hand, as an admirable instrument of education, if properly applied; on the other, as preparing the way for an attitude of mind which could appreciate the reasons for the immense changes already beginning to operate in human thought.