My dear Hooker,
The only science to which X. has contributed, so far as I know, is the science of self-advertisement; and of that he is a master.
When you and I were youngsters, we thought it the great thing to exorcise the aristocratic flunkeyism which reigned in the Royal Society—the danger now is that of the entry of seven devils worse than the first, in the shape of rich engineers, chemical traders, and "experts" (who have sold their souls for a good price), and who find it helps them to appear to the public as if they were men of science.
If the Phil Club had kept pure, it might have acted as a check upon the intrusion of the mere trading element. But there seems to be no reason now against Jack and Tom and Harry getting in, and the thing has become an imposture.
So I go with you for extinction, before we begin to drag in the mud.
I wish I could take some more active part in what is going on. I am anxious about the Society altogether. But though I am wonderfully well so long as I live like a hermit, and get out into the air of the Downs, either London, or bother, and still more both combined, intimate respectfully but firmly, that my margin is of the narrowest.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[The following is to his daughter in Paris. Of course it was the
Tuileries, not the Louvre, which was destroyed in 1871.]
I think you are quite right about French women. They are like French dishes, uncommonly well cooked and sent up, but what the dickens they are made of is a mystery. Not but what all womenkind are mysteries, but there are mysteries of godliness and mysteries of iniquity.