A Happy New Year! and many of them, and may you more and more demonstrate the folly of strangling men at sixty.
CHAPTER 2.18.
1886.
[The controversy with Mr. Gladstone indicates the nature of the subject that Huxley took up for the employment of his newly obtained leisure. Chequered as this leisure was all through the year by constant illness, which drove him again and again to the warmth of Bournemouth or the brisk airs of the Yorkshire moors in default of the sovereign medicine of the Alps, he managed to write two more controversial articles this year, besides a long account of the "Progress of Science," for Mr. T. Humphry Ward's book on "The Reign of Queen Victoria," which was to celebrate the Jubilee year 1887. Examinations—for the last time, however—the meetings of the Eton Governing Body, the business of the Science Schools, the Senate of the London University, the Marine Biological Association, the Council of the Royal Society, and a round dozen of subsidiary committees, all claimed his attention. Even when driven out of town by his bad health, he would come up for a few days at a time to attend necessary meetings.
One of the few references of this period to biological research is contained in a letter to Professor Pelseneer of Ghent, a student of the Mollusca, who afterwards completed for Huxley the long unfinished monograph on "Spirula" for the "Challenger" Report.]
4 Marlborough Place, January 8, 1886.
Dear Sir,
Accept my best thanks for the present of your publications. As you may imagine, I find that on the cretaceous crustaceans very interesting. It was a rare chance to find the branchiae preserved.
I am glad to be able to send you a copy of my memoir on the morphology of the Mollusca. It shows signs of age outside, but I beg you to remember that it is 33 years old.
I am rejoiced to think you find it still worth consulting. It has always been my intention to return to the subject some day, and to try to justify my old conclusions—as I think they may be justified.