[When the Medical Congress was over, he joined his family at Grasmere for the rest of August. In September he attended the British Association at York, where he read a paper on the "Rise and Progress of Palaeontology," and ended the month with fishery business at Aberystwith and Carmarthen.
The above paper is to be found in "Collected Essays," 4 page 24. In it he concludes an historical survey of the views held about fossils by a comparison of the opposite hypothesis upon which the vast store of recently accumulated facts may be interpreted; and declaring for the hypothesis of evolution, repeats the remarkable words of the "Coming of Age of the Origin of Species," that] "the paleontological discoveries of the last decade are so completely in accordance with the requirements of this hypothesis that, if it had not existed, the paleontologist would have had to invent it."
[In February died Thomas Carlyle. Mention has already been made of the influence of his writings upon Huxley in strengthening and fixing once for all, at the very outset of his career, that hatred of shams and love of veracity, which were to be the chief principle of his whole life. It was an obligation he never forgot, and for this, if for nothing else, he was ready to join in a memorial to the man. In reply to a request for his support in so doing, he wrote to Lord Stanley of Alderley on March 9:—]
Anything I can do to help in raising a memorial to Carlyle shall be most willingly done. Few men can have dissented more strongly from his way of looking at things than I; but I should not yield to the most devoted of his followers in gratitude for the bracing wholesome influence of his writings when, as a very young man, I was essaying without rudder or compass to strike out a course for myself.
[Mention has already been made of his ill-health at the end of the year, which was perhaps a premonition of the breakdown of 1883. An indication of the same kind may be found in the following letter to Mrs. Tyndall, who had forwarded a document which Dr. Tyndall had meant to send himself with an explanatory note.]
4 Marlborough Place, March 25, 1881.
My dear Mrs. Tyndall,
But where is his last note to me? That is the question on which I have been anxiously hoping for light since I received yours and the enclosure, which contains such a very sensible proposition that I should like to know how it came into existence, abiogenetically or otherwise.
As I am by way of forgetting everything myself just now, it is a comfort to me to believe that Tyndall has forgotten he forgot to send the letter of which he forgot the inclosure. The force of disremembering could no further go.
In affectionate bewilderment, ever yours,