I hope you are physically better. Look sharply after your diet, take exercise and defy the blue-devils, and you will weather the storm.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[Tyndall, who had not attended the 1873 meeting of the British Association, had heard that some local opposition had been offered to his election as President for the Belfast meeting in 1874, and had written:—
I wish to have an you had not persuaded me to accept that Belfast duty. They do not want me…but Spottiswoode assures me that no individual offered the slightest support to the two unscientific persons who showed opposition.
The following was written in reply:—]
4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
I am sure you are mistaken about the Belfast people. That blundering idiot of — wanted to make himself important and get up a sort of "Home Rule" agitation in the Association, but nobody backed him and he collapsed. I am at your disposition for whatever you want me to do, as you know, and I am sure Hooker is of the same mind. We shall not be ashamed when we meet our enemies in the gate.
The grace of god cannot entirely have deserted you since you are aware of the temperature of that ferocious epistle. Reeks [The late Trenham Reeks, Registrar of the School of Mines, and Curator of the Museum of Practical Geology.], whom I saw yesterday, was luxuriating in it, and said (confound his impudence) that it was quite my style. I forgot to tell him, by the bye, that I had resigned in your favour ever since the famous letter to Carpenter. Well, so long as you are better after it there is no great harm done.