I have little news to give you. The tail of the X.-Hooker storm is drifting over the scientific sky in the shape of fresh attacks by Owen on Hooker. Hooker answered the last angelically, and I hope they are at an end.
The wife has just come in and sends her love (but is careful to add "second-best"). The chicks grow visibly and audibly, and Jess looks quite a woman. All are well except myself, and I am getting better from a fresh breakdown of dyspepsia. I find that if I am to exist at all it must be on strictly ascetic principles, so there is hope of my dying in the odour of sanctity yet. If you recollect, Lancelot did not know that he should "die a holy man" till rather late in life. I have forgotten to tell you about the Rectorship of Aberdeen. I refused to stand at first, on the score of health, and only consented on condition that I should not be called upon to do any public work until after the long vacation. It was a very hard fight, and although I had an absolute majority of over fifty, the mode of election is such that one vote, in one of the four nations, would have turned the scale by giving my opponent the majority in that nation. We should then have been ties, and as the chancellor, who has under such circumstances a casting vote, would have (I believe) given it against me, I should have been beaten.
As it is, the fact of any one, who stinketh in the nostrils of orthodoxy, beating a Scotch peer at his own gates in the most orthodox of Scotch cities, is a curious sign of the times. The reason why they made such a tremendous fight for me, is I believe, that I may carry on the reforms commenced by Grant Duff, my predecessor. Unlike other Lord Rectors, he of Aberdeen is a power and can practically govern the action of the University during his tenure of office.
I saw Pollock yesterday, and he says that they want you back again. Curiously the same desire is epidemically prevalent among your friends, not least here.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[In spite of his anxieties, his health was slowly improving under careful regimen. He published no scientific memoirs this year, but in addition to his regular lectures, he was working to finish his "Manual of Invertebrate Anatomy" and his "Introductory Primer," and to write his Aberdeen address; he was also at work upon the "Pedigree of the Horse" and on "Bodily Motion and Consciousness." He delivered a course to teachers on Psychology and Physiology, and was much occupied by the Royal Commission on Science. As a governor of Owens College he had various meetings to attend, though his duties did not extend, as some of his friends seem to have thought, to the appointment of a Professor of Physiology there.]
My life (he writes to Sir Henry Roscoe) is becoming a burden to me because of —. Why I do not know, but for some reason people have taken it into their heads that I have something to do with appointments in Owens College, and no fewer than three men of whose opinion I think highly have spoken or written to me urging —'s merits very strongly.
[This summer he again took a long holiday, thanks to the generosity of his friends, and with better results. He went with his old friend Hooker to the Auvergne, walking, geologising, sketching, and gradually discarding doctor's orders. Sir Joseph Hooker has very kindly written me a letter from which I give an account of this trip:—
It was during the many excursions we took together, either by ourselves or with one of my boys, that I knew him best at his best: and especially during one of several weeks' duration in the summer of 1873, which we spent in central France and Germany. He had been seriously ill, and was suffering from severe mental depression. For this he was ordered abroad by his physician, Sir A. Clark, to which step he offered a stubborn resistance. With Mrs. Huxley's approval, and being myself quite in the mood for a holiday, I volunteered to wrestle with him, and succeeded, holding out as an inducement a visit to the volcanic region of the Auvergne with Scrope's classical volume, which we both knew and admired, as a guide book.