1873.
[The year opens with a letter to Tyndall, then on a lecturing tour in
America:--]
4 Marlborough Place, Abbey Road, N.W., January 1, 1872 [1873].
My dear Tyndall,
I cannot let this day go by without wishing you a happy New Year, and
lamenting your absence from our customary dinner. But Hirst and
Spencer and Michael Foster are coming, and they shall drink your
health in champagne while I do the like in cold water, making up by
the strength of my good wishes for the weakness of the beverage.
You see I write from the new house. Getting into it was an awful job,
made worse than needful by the infamous weather we have had for weeks
and months, and by the stupid delays of the workmen, whom we had
fairly to shove out at last as we came in. We are settling down by
degrees, and shall be very comfortable by and by, though I do not
suppose that we shall be able to use the drawing-room for two or three
months to come. I am very glad to have made the change, but there is a
drawback to everything in "this here wale," as Mrs. Gamp says and my
present thorn in the flesh is a neighbour, who says I have injured him
by certain operations in my garden, and is trying to get something out
of me by Chancery proceedings. Fancy finding myself a defendant in
Chancery!
It is particularly hard on me, as I have been especially careful to
have nothing done without Burton's sanction and assurance that I was
quite safe in law; and I would have given up anything [rather] than
have got into bother of this kind. But "sich is life."
You seem to have been making a Royal Progress in Yankee-land. We have
been uncommonly tickled with some of the reports of your lectures
which reached us, especially with that which spoke of your having "a
strong English accent."
The loss of your assistant seems to have been the only deduction to be
made from your success. I am afraid you must have felt it much in all
ways.
"My Lord" received your telegram only after the business of "securing
Hirst" was done. That is one of the bright spots in a bad year for me.
Goschen consulted Spottiswood and me independently about the headship
of the new Naval College, and was naturally considerably surprised by
the fact that we coincided in recommending Hirst...The upshot was that
Goschen asked me to communicate with Hirst and see if he would be
disposed to accept the offer. So I did, and found to my great
satisfaction that Hirst took to the notion very kindly. I am sure he
is the very best man for the post to be met with in the three
kingdoms, having that rare combination of qualities by which he gets
on with all manner of men, and singularly attracts young fellows. He
will not only do his duty, but be beloved for doing it, which is what
few people can compass.
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.
We started on July 2nd, I loaded with injunctions from his physician
as to what his patient was to eat, drink, and avoid, how much he was
to sleep and rest, how little to talk and walk, etc., that would have
made the expedition a perpetual burthen to me had I not believed that
I knew enough of my friend's disposition and ailments to be convinced
that not only health but happiness would be our companions throughout.
Sure enough, for the first few days, including a short stay in Paris,
his spirits were low indeed, but this gave me the opportunity of
appreciating his remarkable command over himself and his ever-present
consideration for his companion. Not a word or gesture of irritation
ever escaped him; he exerted himself to obey the instructions laid
down; nay, more, he was instant in his endeavour to save me trouble at
hotels, railway stations, and ticket offices. Still, some mental
recreation was required to expedite recovery, and he found it first by
picking up at a bookstall, a "History of the Miracles of Lourdes,"
which were then exciting the religious fervour of France, and the
interest of her scientific public. He entered with enthusiasm into the
subject, getting together all the treatises upon it, favourable or the
reverse, that were accessible, and I need hardly add, soon arrived at
the conclusion, that the so-called miracles were in part illusions and
for the rest delusions. As it may interest some of your readers to
know what his opinion was in this early stage of the manifestations, I
will give it as he gave it to me. It was a case of two peasant
children sent in the hottest month of the year into a hot valley to
collect sticks for firewood washed up by a stream, when one of them
after stooping down opposite a heat-reverberating rock, was, in
rising, attacked with a transient vertigo, under which she saw a
figure in white against the rock. This bare fact being reported to the
cure of the village, all the rest followed.
Soon after our arrival at Clermont Ferrand, your father had so far
recovered his wonted elasticity of spirits that he took a keen
interest in everything around, the museums, the cathedral, where he
enjoyed the conclusion of the service by a military band which gave
selections from the Figlia del Regimento, but above all he appreciated
the walks and drives to the geological features of the environs. He
reluctantly refrained from ascending the Puy de Dome, but managed the
Pic Parion, Gergovia, Royat, and other points of interest without
fatigue...
After Clermont they visited the other four great volcanic areas
explored by Scrope, Mont Dore, the Cantal, Le Puy, and the valley of
the Ardeche. Under the care of his friend, and relieved from the
strain of work, my father's health rapidly improved. He felt no bad
effects from a night at Mont Dore, when, owing to the crowd of
invalids in the little town, no better accommodation could be found
than a couple of planks in a cupboard. Next day they took up their
quarters in an unpretentious cabaret at La Tour d'Auvergne, one of the
villages on the slopes of the mountain, a few miles away.
Here (writes Sir J. Hooker), and for some time afterwards, on our
further travels, we had many interesting and amusing experiences of
rural life in the wilder parts of central France, its poverty, penury,
and too often its inconceivable impositions and overcharges to
foreigners, quite consistently with good feeling, politeness, and
readiness to assist in many ways.
By the 10th of July, nine days after setting out, I felt satisfied (he
continues) that your father was equal to an excursion upon which he
had set his heart, to the top of the Pic de Sancy, 4000 feet above La
Tour and 7 miles distant.
It was on this occasion that the friends made what they thought a new
discovery, namely evidence of glacial action in central France.
Besides striated stones in the fields or built into the walls, they
noticed the glaciated appearance of one of the valleys descending from
the peak, and especially some isolated gigantic masses of rock on an
open part of the valley, several miles away, as to which they debated
whether they were low buildings or transported blocks. Sir Joseph
visited them next day, and found they were the latter, brought down
from the upper part of the peak. (He published an account of these
blocks in "Nature" 8 31, 166, but subsequently found that glaciation
had been observed by von Lassaul in 1872 and by Sir William Guise in
1870.)
Lepuy offered a special attraction apart from scenery and geology. In
the museum was the skeleton of a prehistoric man that had been found
in the breccia of the neighbourhood, associated with the remains of
the rhinoceros, elephant, and other extinct mammals. My father's
sketch-book contains drawings of these bones and of the ravine where
they were discovered, although in spite of directions from M. Aymard,
the curator, he could not find the exact spot. Under the sketch is a
description of the remains, in which he notes,] "The bones do not look
fresher than some of those of Elephas and Rhinoceros in the same or
adjacent cases."
[As for the final stage of the excursion:--
After leaving the Ardeche (continues Sir J. Hooker), with no Scrope to
lead or follow, our scientific ardours collapsed. We had vague views
as to future travel. Whatever one proposed was unhesitatingly acceded
to by the other. A more happy-go-lucky pair of idlers never joined
company.
As will be seen from the following letters, they made their way to the
Black Forest, where they stayed till Sir Joseph's duties called him
back to England, and my mother came out to join my father for the rest
of his holiday. (You ask me (Sir Joseph adds) whether your father
smoked on the occasion of this tour. Yes, he did, cigars in
moderation. But the history of his addiction to tobacco that grew upon
him later in life, dates from an earlier excursion that we took
together, and I was the initiator of the practice. It happened in this
wise; he had been suffering from what was supposed to be gastric
irritation, and, being otherwise "run down," we agreed to go, in
company with Sir John Lubbock, on a tour to visit the great monoliths
of Brittany. This was in 1867. On arriving at Dinan he suffered so
much, that I recommended his trying a few cigarettes which I had with
me. They acted as a charm, and this led to cigars, and finally, about
1875 I think, to the pipe. That he subsequently carried the use of
tobacco to excess is, I think, unquestionable. I repeatedly
remonstrated with him, at last I think (by backing his medical
adviser) with effect.
I have never blamed myself for the "teaching him" to smoke, for the
practice habitually palliated his distressing symptoms when nothing
else did, nor can his chronic illness be attributed to the abuse of
tobacco.)
The following letters to Sir H. Roscoe and Dr. Tyndall were written
during this tour:--]
Le Puy, Haute Loire, France, July 17, 1873.
My dear Roscoe,
Your very kind letter reached me just as I was in the hurry of getting
away from England, and I have been carrying it about in my pocket ever
since.
Hooker and I have been having a charming time of it among the
volcanoes of the Auvergne, and we are now on our way to those of the
Velay and Vivarrais. The weather has been almost perfect. Perhaps a
few degrees of temperature could have been spared now and then,
especially at Clermont, of which somebody once said that having stayed
there the climate of hell would have no terrors for him.
It has been warm in the Mont Dore country and in the Cantal, as it is
here, but we are very high up, and there is a charming freshness and
purity about the air.
I do not expect to be back before the end of September, and my
lectures begin somewhere in the second week of October. After they
commence I shall not be able to leave London even for a day, but I
shall be very glad to come to the inauguration of your new buildings
if the ceremony falls within my possible time. And you know I am
always glad to be your guest.
I am thriving wonderfully. Indeed all that plagues me now is my
conscience, for idling about when I feel full of vigour. But I
promised to be obedient, and I am behaving better than Auld Clootie
did when he fell sick.
I hope you are routing out the gout. This would be the place for
you--any quantity of mineral waters.
Pray remember me very kindly to Mrs. Roscoe, and believe me, ever
yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Hotel de France, Baden-Baden, July 30, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
We find ourselves here after a very successful cruise in the Auvergne
and Ardeche, successful at least so far as beauty and geological
interest go. The heat was killing, and obliged us to give up all
notion of going to Ursines, as we had at first intended to do. So we
turned our faces north and made for Grenoble, hoping for a breath of
cool air from the mountains of Dauphiny. But Grenoble was hotter even
than Clermont (which, by the way, quite deserves its reputation as a
competitor with hell), a neighbour's drains were adrift close to the
hotel, and we got poisoned before we could escape. Luckily we got off
with nothing worse than a day or two's diarrhoea. After this the best
thing seemed to be to rush northward to Gernsbach, which had been
described to me as a sort of earthly paradise. We reached the place
last Saturday night, and found ourselves in a big rambling hotel,
crammed full of people, and planted in the bottom of a narrow valley,
all hot and steaming. A large pigstye "convenient" to the house
mingled its vapours with those of the seventy or eighty people who ate
and drank without any other earthly occupation that we could discern
during the three days we were bound, by stress of letters and dirty
linen, to stop. On Monday we made an excursion over here, prospecting,
and the air was so fresh and good, and things in general looked so
promising that I made up my mind to put up in Baden-Baden until the
wife joins me. She writes me that you talk of leaving England on
Friday, and I may remark that Baden is on the high road to
Switzerland. Verbum sap.
I am wonderfully better, and really feel ashamed of loafing about when
I might very well be at work. But I have promised to make holiday, and
make holiday I will.
No proof of your answer to Forbes' biographer reached me before I
left, so I suppose you had not received one in time. I am dying to see
it out.
Hooker is down below, but I take upon myself to send his love. He is
in great force now that he has got rid of his Grenoble mulligrubs.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[After parting company with Hooker, he paid a flying visit to
Professor Bonnet at Geneva; then he was joined by his wife and son for
the last three weeks of the holiday, which were spent at Baden and in
the Bernese Oberland. Before this, he writes home:--]
I feel quite a different man from what I was two months ago, and you
will say that you have a much more creditable husband than the
broken-down old fellow who has been a heart-ache to you so long, when
you see me. The sooner you can get away the better. If the rest only
does you as much good as it does me, I shall be very happy.
Axenstein, Luzerne, August 24, 1873.
My dear Tyndall,
The copies of your booklet ["Principal Forbes and his Biographers."]
intended for Hooker and me reached me just as I left Baden last
Tuesday. Hooker had left me for home a fortnight before, and I hardly
know whether to send his to Kew or keep them for him till I return. I
have read mine twice, and I think that nothing could be better than
the tone you have adopted. I did not suspect that you had such a shot
in your locker as the answer to Forbes about the direction of the
"crevasses" referred to by Rendu. It is a deadly thrust; and I shall
be curious to see what sort of parry the other side will attempt. For
of course they will attempt something. Scotland is, I believe, the
only country in the world in which you can bring in action for
"putting to silence" an adversary who will go on with an obviously
hopeless suit. The lawgivers knew the genius of the people; and it is
to be regretted that they could not establish a process of the same
sort in scientific matters.
I wrote to you a month ago to tell you how we had been getting on in
France. Hooker and I were very jolly, notwithstanding the heat, and I
think that the Vivarrais is the most instructive country in the world
for seeing what water can do in cutting down the hardest rocks.
Scrope's book is very good on the whole, though the pictures are a
little overdone.
My wife and Leonard met me at Cologne on the 11th. Then we went on to
Baden and rested till last Tuesday, when we journeyed to Luzerne and,
getting out of that hot and unsavoury hole as fast as we could, came
here last Thursday.
We find ourselves very well off. The hotel is perched up 1800 feet
above the lake, with a beautiful view of Pilatus on the west and of
the Urner See on the south. On the north we have the Schwyz valley, so
that we are not shut in, and the air is very good and fresh. There are
plenty of long walks to be had without much fatigue, which suits the
wife. Leonard promises to have very good legs of his own with plenty
of staying power. I have given him one or two sharp walks, and I find
he has plenty of vigour and endurance. But he is not thirteen yet and
I do not mean to let him do overmuch, though we are bent on a visit to
a glacier. I began to tell him something about the glaciers the other
day, but I was promptly shut up with, "Oh, yes! I know all about that.
It's in Dr. Tyndall's book."--which said book he seems to me to have
got by heart. He is the sweetest little fellow imaginable; and either
he has developed immensely in the course of the last year, or I have
never been so much thrown together with him alone, and have not had
the opportunity of making him out.
You are a fatherly old bachelor, and will not think me a particularly
great donkey for prattling on in this way about my swan, who probably
to unprejudiced eyes has a power of goose about him.
I suppose you know that in company with yourself and Hooker, the
paternal gander (T.H.H.) has been honoured by the King of Sweden and
made into a Polar Goose by the order of the North Star. Hooker has
explained to the Swedish Ambassador that English officials are
prohibited by order in Council from accepting foreign orders, and I
believe keeps the cross and ribbon on these conditions. If it were an
ordinary decoration I should decline with thanks, but I am told it is
a purely scientific and literary affair like the Prussian "pour le
merite"; so when I get back I shall follow Hooker's line.
I met Laugel on board the Luzerne steamboat the other day, and he told
me that you were at the Belalp--gallivanting as usual, and likely to
remain there for some time. So I send this on the chance of finding
you.
With best love from us all, ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
I am as well as I ever was in my life--regularly set up--in token
whereof I have shaved off my beard.
[In another letter to his wife, dated August 8, from Baden, there is a
very interesting passage about himself and his aims. He has just been
speaking about his son's doings at school:--]
I have been having a great deal of talk with myself about my future
career too, and I have often thought over what you say in the letter
you wrote to the Puy. I don't quite understand what -- meant about the
disputed reputation, unless it is a reputation for getting into
disputes. But to say truth I am not greatly concerned about any
reputation except that of being entirely honest and straightforward,
and that reputation I think and hope I have.
For the rest...the part I have to play is not to found a new school of
thought or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old schools. We are in
the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and
produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that
movement. But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the
bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free
thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to succumb
after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues
vast political and social troubles. I have no more doubt that free
thought will win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing
to you, or that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent
system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole.
But this organisation will be the work of generations of men, and
those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no
lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions. I may be able to help a
little in this direction--perhaps I may have helped already. For the
present, however, I am disposed to draw myself back entirely into my
own branch of physical science. There is enough and to spare for me to
do in that line, and, for years to come, I do not mean to be tempted
out of it.
[Strangely enough, this was the one thing he was destined not to do.
Official work multiplied about him. From 1870 to 1884 only two years
passed without his serving on one or two Royal Commissions. He was
Secretary of the Royal Society from 1871 to 1880, and President from
1883 to his retirement, owing to ill-health, in 1885. He became Dean
as well as Professor of Biology in the College of Science, and
Inspector of Fisheries. Though he still managed to find some time for
anatomical investigations, and would steal a precious hour or
half-hour by driving back from the Home Office to his laboratory at
South Kensington before returning home to St. John's Wood, the amount
of such work as he was able to publish could not be very great.
His most important contributions during this decennium (writes Sir M.
Foster) were in part continuations of his former labours, such as the
paper and subsequent full memoir on Stagonolepis, which appeared in
1875 and 1877, and papers on the Skull. The facts that he called a
communication to the Royal Society, in 1875 (written 1874.), on
Amphioxus, a preliminary note, and that a paper read to the Zoological
Society in 1876, on Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked Number 1 of the
series of Contributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before
him the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when
opportunity offered; but, alas! the opportunity which came was small,
the preliminary note had no full successor, and Number 1 was only
followed, and that after an interval of seven years, by a brief Number
2. A paper "On the Characters of the Pelvis," in the "Proceedings of
the Royal Society," in 1879, is full of suggestive thought, but its
concluding passages seem to suggest that others, and not he himself,
were to carry out the ideas. Most of the papers of this decennium deal
with vertebrate morphology, and are more or less connected with his
former researches, but in one respect, at least, he broke quite fresh
ground. He had chosen the crayfish as one of the lessons for the class
in general biology spoken of above, and was thus drawn into an
interesting study of crayfishes, by which he was led to a novel and
important analysis of the gill plumes as evidence of affinity and
separation. He embodied the main results of his studies in a paper to
the Zoological Society, and treated the whole subject in a more
popular style in a book on the Crayfish. In a somewhat similar way,
having taken the dog as an object lesson in mammalian anatomy for his
students, he was led to a closer study of that common animal,
resulting in papers on that subject to the Zoological Society in 1880,
and in two lectures at the Royal Institution in 1880. He had intended
so to develop this study of the dog as to make it tell the tale of
mammalian morphology; but this purpose, too, remained unaccomplished.
Moreover, though he sent one paper (on Hyperodapedon Gordoni) to the
Geological Society as late as 1887, yet the complete breakdown of his
health in 1885, which released him from nearly all his official
duties, at the same time dulled his ardour for anatomical pursuits.
Stooping over his work became an impossibility.
Though he carried about him, as does every man of like calibre and
experience, a heavy load of fragments of inquiry begun but never
finished, and as heavy a load of ideas for promising investigations
never so much as even touched, though his love of science and belief
in it might never have wavered, though he never doubted the value of
the results which further research would surely bring him, there was
something working within him which made his hand, when turned to
anatomical science, so heavy that he could not lift it. Not even that
which was so strong within him, the duty of fulfilling a promise,
could bring him to the work. In his room at South Kensington, where
for a quarter of a century he had laboured with such brilliant effect,
there lay on his working table for months, indeed for years, partly
dissected specimens of the rare and little studied marine animal,
Spirula, of which he had promised to contribute an account to the
Reports of the "Challenger" Expedition, and hard by lay the already
engraven plates; there was still wanted nothing more than some further
investigation and the working out of the results. But it seemed as if
some hidden hands were always being stretched out to keep him from the
task; and eventually another labourer had to complete it. (Ibid.)
The remaining letters of this year include several to Dr. Dohrn, which
show the continued interest my father took in the great project of the
Biological Station at Naples, which was carried through in spite of
many difficulties. He had various books and proceedings of learned
societies sent out at Dr. Dohrn's request (I omit the details), and
proposed a scheme for raising funds towards completing the building
when the contractor failed. The scheme, however, was not put into
execution.]
4 Marlborough Place, February 24, 1873.
My dear Dohrn,
I was very glad to receive the fine sealed letter, and to get some
news of you--though to be sure there is not much of you in the letter,
but all is "Station, Station."
I congratulate you heartily on your success with your undertaking, and
I only wish I could see England represented among the applicants for
tables. But you see England is so poor, and the present price of coals
obliges her to economise.
I envy you your visit from "Pater Anchises" Baer, and rejoice to hear
that the grand old man is well and strong enough to entertain such a
project. I wish I could see my way to doing the like. I have had a
long bout of illness--ever since August--but I am now very much
better, indeed, I hope I may say quite well. The weariness of all this
has been complicated by the trouble of getting into a new house, and
in addition a lawsuit brought by a knavish neighbour, in the hope of
extracting money out of me.
I am happy to say, however, that he has just been thoroughly and
effectually defeated. It has been a new experience for me, and I hope
it may be my last as well as my first acquaintance with English law,
which is a luxury of the most expensive character.
If Dr. Kleinenberg is with you, please to tell him, with my
compliments and thanks for the copy of his Memoir, that I went over
his Hydra paper pretty carefully in the summer, and satisfied myself
as to the correctness of his statements about the structure of the
ectoderm and about the longitudinal fibres. About the Endoderm I am
not so clear, and I often found indications of delicate circular
fibres in close apposition with the longitudinal ones. However, I had
not time to work all this out, and perhaps might as well say nothing
about it.
Pray make my very kind remembrances to Mr. Grant. I trust that his
dramas may have a brilliant reception.
The Happy Family flourishes. But we shall look to your coming to see
us. The house is big enough now to give you a bedroom, and you know
you will have no lack of welcome.
I have said nothing about my wife (who has been in a state not only of
superhuman, but of superfeminine, activity for the last three months)
meaning to leave her the last page to speak for herself.
With best compliments to the "ladies downstairs," ever yours very
faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
4 Marlborough Place, October 17, 1873.
My dear Dohrn,
Your letter reached me nearly a week ago, and I have been turning over
its contents in my mind as well as I could, but have been able to come
to no clear conclusion until now. I have been incessantly occupied
with other things.
I will do for you, and gladly, anything I would do for myself, but I
could not apply on my own behalf to any of those rich countrymen of
mine, unless they were personally well known to me, and I had the
opportunity of feeling my way with them. But if you are disposed to
apply to any of the people you mention, I shall be only too glad to
back your application with all the force I am master of. You may make
use of my name to any extent as guarantor of the scientific value and
importance of your undertaking and refer any one to whom you may apply
to me. It may be, in fact, that this is all you want, but as you have
taken to the caprice of writing in my tongue instead of in that
vernacular, idiomatic and characteristically Dohrnian German in which
I delight, I am not so sure about your meaning. There is a rub for
you. If you write to me in English again I will send the letter back
without paying the postage.
In any case let me have a precise statement of your financial
position. I may have a chance of talking to some Croesus, and the
first question he is sure to ask me is--How am I to know that this is
a stable affair, and that I am not throwing my money into the sea?...
[Referring to an unpleasant step it seemed necessary to take]...you
must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No
good is ever done in this world by hesitation...
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.
Somebody has sent me the two numbers of Scribner with Blauvelt's
articles on "Modern Skepticism." They seem to be very well done, and
he has a better appreciation of the toughness of the job before him
than any of the writers of his school with whom I have met. But it is
rather cool of you to talk of his pitching into Spencer when you are
chief target yourself. I come in only par parenthese, and I am glad to
see that people are beginning to understand my real position, and to
separate me from such raging infidels as you and Spencer.
Ever thine,
T.H. Huxley.
[He was unable to attend the opening of Owens College this autumn, and
having received but a scanty account of the proceedings, wrote as
follows:--]
4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., October 16, 1873.
My dear Roscoe,
I consider myself badly used. Nobody has sent me a Manchester paper
with the proceedings of the day of inauguration, when, I hear, great
speeches were made.
I DID get TWO papers containing your opening lecture, and the
"Fragment of a Morality," for which I am duly grateful, but two copies
of one days' proceedings are not the same thing as one copy of two
days' proceedings, and I consider it is very disrespectful to a
Governor (large G) not to let him know what went on.
By all accounts which have reached me it was a great success, and I
congratulate you heartily. I only wish that I could have been there to
see.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The autumn brought a slow improvement in health--]
I am travelling [he writes] between the two stations of dyspepsia and
health thus [illustrated by a zigzag with "mean line ascending".
[The sympathy of the convalescent appears in various letters to
friends who were ill. Thus, in reply to Mr. Hyde Clarke, the
philologist and, like himself, a member of the Ethnological Society,
he writes:--]
November 18, 1873.
I am glad to learn two things from your note--first, that you are
getting better; second, that there is hope of some good coming out of
that Ashantee row, if only in the shape of rare vocables.
My attention is quite turned away from Anthropological matters at
present, but I will bear your question in mind if opportunity offers.
[A letter to Professor Rolleston at Oxford gives a lively account of
his own ailments, which could only have been written by one now
recovering from them, while the illness of another friend raised a
delicate point of honour, which he laid before the judgment of Mr.
Darwin, more especially as the latter had been primarily concerned in
the case.]
4 Marlborough Place, October 16, 1873.
My dear Rolleston,
A note which came from Mrs. Rolleston to my wife the other day, kindly
answering some inquiries of ours about the Oxford Middle Class
Examination, gave us but a poor account of your health.
This kind of thing won't do, you know. Here is -- ill, and I doing all
I can to persuade him to go away and take care of himself, and now
comes ill news of you.
Is it dyspeps again? If so follow in my steps. I mean to go about the
country, with somebody who can lecture, as the "horrid
example"--cured. Nothing but gross and disgusting intemperance, Sir,
was the cause of all my evil. And now that I have been a teetotaller
for nine months, and have cut down my food supply to about half of
what I used to eat, the enemy is beaten.
I have carried my own permissive bill, and no canteen (except for my
friends who still sit in darkness) is allowed on the premises. And as
this is the third letter I have written before breakfast (a thing I
never could achieve in the days when I wallowed in the stye of
Epicurus), you perceive that I am as vigorous as ever I was in my
life.
Let me have news of you, and believe me,
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Athenaeum Club, November 3, 1873.
My dear Darwin,
You will have heard (in fact I think I mentioned the matter when I
paid you my pleasant visit the other day) that -- is ill and obliged
to go away for six months to a warm climate. It is a great grief to
me, as he is a man for whom I have great esteem and affection, apart
from his high scientific merits, and his symptoms are such as cause
very grave anxiety. I shall be happily disappointed if that accursed
consumption has not got hold of him.
The college authorities have behaved as well as they possibly could to
him, and I do not suppose that his enforced retirement for a while
gives him the least pecuniary anxiety, as his people are all well off,
and he himself has an income apart from his college pay. Nevertheless,
under such circumstances, a man with half a dozen children always
wants all the money he can lay hands on; and whether he does or no, he
ought not to be allowed to deprive himself of any, which leads me to
the gist of my letter. His name was on your list as one of those
hearty friends who came to my rescue last year, and it was the only
name which made me a little uneasy, for I doubted whether it was right
for a man with his responsibilities to make sacrifices of this sort.
However, I stifled that feeling, not seeing what else I could do
without wounding him. But now my conscience won't let me be, and I do
not think that any consideration ought to deter me from getting his
contribution back to him somehow or other. There is no one to whose
judgment on a point of honour I would defer more readily than yours,
and I am quite sure you will agree with me. I really am quite unhappy
and ashamed to think of myself as vigorous and well at the expense of
his denying himself any rich man's caprice he might take a fancy to.
So, my dear, good friend, let me know what his contribution was, that
I may get it back to him somehow or other, even if I go like Nicodemus
privily and by night to his bankers.
Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.