Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2

by Thomas Henry Huxley

August 21.

Everything is going on very well here. The weather is delightful, and under these circumstances my lodgings here with John Ball for a companion turns out to be a most excellent arrangement. Ca va sans dire, though, by the way, that is a bull induced by the locality. I am not going on any of the excursions on Sunday. I am going to have a quiet day here when everybody will suppose that I have accepted everybody else's invitation to be somewhere else. The Ulster Hall, in which the addresses are delivered, seems to me to be a terrible room to speak in, and I mean to nurse my energies all Monday. I sent you a cutting from one of the papers containing an account of me that will amuse you. The writer is evidently disappointed that I am not a turbulent savage.

August 25.

…My work is over and I start for Kingstown, where I mean to sleep to-night, in an hour. I have just sent you a full and excellent report of my lecture. ["On Animals as Automata": see above.] I am glad to say it was a complete success. I never was in better voice in my life, and I spoke for an hour and a half without notes, the people listening as still as mice. There has been a great row about Tyndall's address, and I had some reason to expect that I should have to meet a frantically warlike audience. But it was quite otherwise, and though I spoke my mind with very great plainness, I never had a warmer reception. And I am not without hope that I have done something to allay the storm, though, as you may be sure, I did not sacrifice plain speaking to that end…I have been most creditably quiet here, and have gone to no dinners or breakfasts or other such fandangoes except those I accepted before leaving home. Sunday I spent quietly here, thinking over my lecture and putting my peroration, which required a good deal of care, into shape. I wandered out into the fields in the afternoon, and sat a long time thinking of all that had happened since I was here a young beginner, two and twenty, and…you were largely in my thoughts, which were full of blessings and tender memories.

I had a good night's work last night. I dined with the President of the College, and then gave my lecture. After that I smoked a bit with Foster till eleven o'clock, and then I went to the "Northern Whig" office to see that the report of my lecture was all right. It is the best paper here, and the Editor had begged me to see to the report, and I was anxious myself that I should be rightly represented. So I sat there till a quarter past one having the report read and correcting it when necessary. Then I came home and got to bed about two. I have just been to the section and read my paper there to a large audience who cannot have understood ten words of it, but who looked highly edified, and now I have done. Our lodging has turned out admirably, and Ball's company has been very pleasant. So that the fiasco of our arrangements was all for the best.

[I take the account of this last-mentioned paper in Section D from the report in "Nature":—

Professor Huxley opened the last day of the session with an account of his recent observations on the development of the Columella auris in Amphibia. (He described it as an outgrowth of the periotic capsule, and therefore unconnected with any visceral arch.)…

In the absence of Mr. Parker there was no one competent to criticise the paper from personal knowledge; but a word dropped as to the many changes in the accepted homologies of the ossicula auditus, elicited a masterly and characteristic exposition of the series of new facts, and the modifications of the theory they have led to, from Reichert's first observations down to the present time. The embryonic structures grew and shaped themselves on the board, and shifted their relations in accordance with the views of successive observers, until a graphic epitome of the progress of knowledge on the subject was completed.

He and Parker indeed (to whom he signs himself, "Ever yours amphibially") had been busy, not only throughout 1874, but for several years earlier, examining the development of the Amphibia, with a particular view to the whole theory of the vertebrate skull, for which he had done similar work in 1857 and 1858. Thus on May 4, 1870, he writes to Parker:—]

I read all the most important part of your Frog-paper last night, and a grand piece of work it is—more important, I think, in all its bearings than anything you have done yet.