T.H. Huxley.
[The following passage from a letter to Sir J.D. Hooker refers to a striking discovery made by Dubois:—]
Hodeslea, Eastbourne, February 14, 1895.
The Dutchmen seem to have turned up something like the "missing link" in Java, according to a paper I have just received from Marsh. I expect he was a Socratic party, with his hair rather low down on his forehead and warty cheeks.
Pithecanthropus erectus Dubois (fossil)
rather Aino-ish about the body, small in the calf, and cheese-cutting in the shins. Le voici!
CHAPTER 3.14.
1895.
Two months of almost continuous frost, during which the thermometer fell below zero, marked the winter of 1894-95. Tough, if not strong, as Huxley's constitution was, this exceptional cold, so lowering to the vitality of age, accentuated the severity of the illness which followed in the train of influenza, and at last undermined even his powers of resistance.
But until the influenza seized him, he was more than usually vigorous and brilliant. He was fatigued, but not more so than he expected, by attending a deputation to the Prime Minister in the depth of January, and delivering a speech on the London University question; and in February he was induced to write a reply to the attack upon agnosticism contained in Mr. Arthur Balfour's "Foundations of Belief". Into this he threw himself with great energy, all the more because the notices in the daily press were likely to give the reading public a wrong impression as to its polemic against his own position. Mr. Wilfrid Ward gives an account of a conversation with him on this subject:—