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Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2

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Title: Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2

Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

Editor: Leonard Huxley


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5226]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Sue Asscher


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY — VOLUME 2 ***




Produced by Sue Asscher asschers@bigpond.com




LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

BY HIS SON

LEONARD HUXLEY.



IN THREE VOLUMES.


VOLUME 2.


(PLATE: T.H. HUXLEY, PHOTOGRAPH BY WALKER AND COCKERILL, PH. SC.
SIGNED T.H. HUXLEY, 1857.)



CONTENTS.


CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.

CHAPTER 2.2. 1871.

CHAPTER 2.3. 1872.

CHAPTER 2.4. 1873.

CHAPTER 2.5. 1874.

CHAPTER 2.6. 1875-1876.

CHAPTER 2.7. 1875-1876.

CHAPTER 2.8. 1876.

CHAPTER 2.9. 1877.

CHAPTER 2.10. 1878.

CHAPTER 2.11. 1879.

CHAPTER 2.12. 1881.

CHAPTER 2.13. 1882.

CHAPTER 2.14. 1883.

CHAPTER 2.15. 1884.

CHAPTER 2.16. 1884-1885.

CHAPTER 2.17. 1885.

CHAPTER 2.18. 1886.

CHAPTER 2.19. 1886.



CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.

[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.
From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years
of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had
been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by
his personal energy and power. When at length settled in the
professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself
more than a beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the
field of knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred
subjects in order to know the true bearings of his own little portion,
that he treated the next six years simply as years of further
apprenticeship. Under the suggestive power of the "Origin of Species"
all these scattered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the
philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his thought
with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in defence of the new
hypothesis first brought him before the public eye as one who not only
had the courage of his convictions when attacked, but could, and more,
would, carry the war effectively into the enemy's country. And for the
next ten years he was commonly identified with the championship of the
most unpopular view of the time; a fighter, an assailant of
long-established fallacies, he was too often considered a mere
iconoclast, a subverter of every other well-rooted institution,
theological, educational, or moral.

It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in
the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies.
His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual
gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held
"without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by
W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism,
materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in
token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of
the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by
the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."

But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came
forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform,
seeking not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show,
in theory and practice, how scientific training might be introduced
into the general system of education. He was more than once asked to
stand for Parliament, but refused, thinking he could do more useful
work for his country outside.

The publication in 1870 of "Lay Sermons," the first of a series of
similar volumes, served, by concentrating his moral and intellectual
philosophy, to make his influence as a teacher of men more widely
felt. The "active scepticism," whose conclusions many feared, was yet
acknowledged as the quality of mind which had made him one of the
clearest thinkers and safest scientific guides of his time, while his
keen sense of right and wrong made the more reflective of those who
opposed his conclusions hesitate long before expressing a doubt as to
the good influence of his writings. This view is very clearly
expressed in a review of the book in the "Nation" (New York 1870 11
407).

And as another review of the "Lay Sermons" puts it ("Nature" 3 22), he
began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy
smooth things.

During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than
upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of
four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in
addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work,
and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the
popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the
progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological
researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian
lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870
onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.
For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after
another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to
increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological
Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the
Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the
Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society'
which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of
the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to
1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied
no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very
high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this
country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short
through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal
Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)

The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He
published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on
two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other
on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.

The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to
the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the
year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was
President, on "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief
Modifications of Mankind," March 9--and on "The Ethnology of Britain,"
May 10--the substance of which appeared in the "Contemporary Review"
for July under the title of "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology"
("Collected Essays" 7 253). As President also of the Geological
Society and of the British Association, he had two important addresses
to deliver. In addition to this, he delivered an address before the
Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on "Descartes' Discourse."

How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to
Down:--]

26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

It is hard to resist an invitation of yours--but I dine out on
Saturday; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of
one kind or another. And there is that horrid Geological address
looming in the future!

I am afraid I must deny myself at present.

I am glad you liked the sermon. Did you see the "Devonshire man's"
attack in the "Pall Mall?"

I have been wasting my time in polishing that worthy off. I would not
have troubled myself about him, if it were not for the political
bearing of the Celt question just now.

My wife sends her love to all you.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The reference to the "Devonshire Man" is as follows:--Huxley had been
speaking of the strong similarity between Gaul and German, Celt and
Teuton, before the change of character brought about by the Latin
conquest; and of the similar commixture, a dash of Anglo-Saxon in the
mass of Celtic, which prevailed in our western borders and many parts
of Ireland, e.g. Tipperary.

The "Devonshire Man" wrote on January 18 to the "Pall Mall Gazette,"
objecting to the statement that "Devonshire men are as little
Anglo-Saxons as Northumbrians are Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st,
meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and
especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show
that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the
German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between
the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous
question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or
the pure Irish? Milesian, Firbolg, or Cruithneach?

But the "Devonshire Man" did not confine himself to science. He
indulged in various personalities, to the smartest of which, a parody
of Sydney Smith's dictum on Dr. Whewell, Huxley replied:--]

"A Devonshire Man" is good enough to say of me that "cutting up
monkeys is his forte, and cutting up men is his foible." With your
permission, I propose to cut up "A Devonshire Man"; but I leave it to
the public to judge whether, when so employed, my occupation is to be
referred to the former or to the latter category.

[For this he was roundly lectured by the "Spectator" on January 29, in
an article under the heading "Pope Huxley." Regardless of the rights
or wrongs of the controversy, he was chidden for the abusive language
of the above paragraph, and told that he was a very good anatomist,
but had better not enter into discussions on other subjects.

The same question is developed in the address to the Ethnological
Society later in the year and in "Some Fixed Points in British
Ethnology" (see above), and reiterated in an address from the chair in
Section D at the British Association in 1878 at Dublin, and in a
letter to the "Times" for October 12, 1887, apropos of a leading
article upon "British Race-types of To-day."

Letter-writing was difficult under such pressure of work, but the
claims of absent friends were not wholly forgotten, though left on one
side for a time, and the warm-hearted Dohrn, could not bear to think
himself forgotten, managed to get a letter out of him--not on
scientific business.]

26 Abbey Place, January 30, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and
thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I
have not written to you. But in another sense, I do not, for I have
very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you
once before, your memory always remains green in the "happy family."

But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion
to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer
I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content
to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we
meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off,
I shall be a friendless old man.

As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture says that "a
living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a living dog. By the
way, I bought Cotta's edition of him the other day, and there he
stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble
edges. Do you know I did a version of his "Aphorisms on Nature" into
English the other day. [For the first number of "Nature," November
1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little. When they
began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly
gone mad!

But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received your
volume on the "Arthropods" the other day, but I shall not be able to
look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my
lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological
Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of
office as President expires.

After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings and, as
always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest interest. But I
wish you would not take it into your head that Darwin or I, or any one
else thinks otherwise than highly of you, or that you need
"re-establishing" in any one's eyes. But I hope you will not have
finished your work before the autumn, as they have made me President
of the British Association this year, and I shall be very busy with my
address in the summer. The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on
the 14th September, and I live in hope that you will be able to come
over. Let me know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.

I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet. But for Heaven's
sake don't be angry with me in English again. It's far worse than a
scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I
have my German friends.

[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological
Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and
the Doctrine of Evolution" "Collected Essays" 8.) He took the
opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed
out the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in
particular traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a
series of fossil types approaching more and more to a generalised
ungulate type and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or
collateral of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two
other toes which appertain to the average quadruped.]

If [he said] the expectation raised by the splints of horses that, in
some ancestor of the horses, these splints would be found to be
complete digits, has been verified, we are furnished with very strong
reasons for looking for a no less complete verification of the
expectation that the three-toed Plagiolophus-like "avus" of the horse
must have been a five-toed "atavus" at some early period.

[Six years afterwards, this forecast of paleontological research was
to be fulfilled, but at the expense of the European ancestry of the
horse. A series of ancestors, similar to these European fossils, but
still more equine, and extending in unbroken order much farther back
in geological time, was discovered in America. His use of this in his
New York lectures as demonstrative evidence of evolution, and the
immediate fulfilment of a further prophecy of his will be told in due
course.

His address to the Cambridge Y.M.C.A, "A Commentary on Descartes'
'Discourse touching the method of using reason rightly, and of seeking
scientific truth,'" was delivered on March 24. This was an attempt to
give this distinctively Christian audience some vision of the world of
science and philosophy, which is neither Christian nor Unchristian,
but Extra-christian, and to show] "by what methods the dwellers
therein try to distinguish truth from falsehood, in regard to some of
the deepest and most difficult problems that beset humanity, "in order
to be clear about their actions, and to walk sure-footedly in this
life," as Descartes says. For Descartes had laid the foundation of his
own guiding principle of "active scepticism, which strives to conquer
itself."

[Here again, as in the "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail,
he explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of
shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted
passage, apropos of the] "introduction of Calvinism into science."

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think
what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a
sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I
should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about
is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part
with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.

[This was the latest of the essays included in "Lay Sermons, Addresses
and Reviews," which came out, with a dedicatory letter to Tyndall, in
the summer of 1870, and, whether on account of its subject matter or
its title, always remained his most popular volume of essays.

To the same period belongs a letter to Matthew Arnold about his book
"St. Paul and Protestantism."]

My dear Arnold,

Many thanks for your book which I have been diving into at odd times
as leisure served, and picking up many good things.

One of the best is what you say near the end about science gradually
conquering the materialism of popular religion.

It will startle the Puritans who always coolly put the matter the
other way; but it is profoundly true.

These people are for the most part mere idolaters with a Bible-fetish,
who urgently stand in need of conversion by Extra-christian
Missionaries.

It takes all one's practical experience of the importance of Puritan
ways of thinking to overcome one's feeling of the unreality of their
beliefs. I had pretty well forgotten how real to them "the man in the
next street" is, till your citation of their horribly absurd dogmas
reminded me of it. If you can persuade them that Paul is fairly
interpretable in your sense, it may be the beginning of better things,
but I have my doubts if Paul would own you, if he could return to
expound his own epistles.

I am glad you like my Descartes article. My business with my
scientific friends is something like yours with the Puritans, nature
being OUR Paul.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, May 10, 1870.

[From the 14th to the 24th of April Huxley, accompanied by his friend
Hooker, made a trip to the Eifel country. His sketch-book is full of
rapid sketches of the country, many of them geological; one day indeed
there are eight, another nine such.

Tyndall was invited to join the party, and at first accepted, but then
recollected the preliminaries which had to be carried out before his
lectures on electricity at the end of the month. So he writes on April
6:--

Royal Institution, 6 April.

My dear Huxley,

I was rendered drunk by the excess of prospective pleasure when you
mentioned the Eifel yesterday, and took no account of my lectures.
They begin on the 28th, and I have studiously to this hour excluded
them from my thought. I have made arrangements to see various
experiments involving the practical application of electricity before
the lectures begin; I find myself, in short, cut off from the
expedition. My regret on this score is commensurable with the
pleasures I promised myself. Confound the lectures!

And yours on Friday is creating a pretty hubbub already. (On the
Pedigree of the Horse" April 8, 1870, which was never brought out in
book form.) I am torn to pieces by women in search of tickets.
Anything that touches progenitorship interests them. You will have a
crammed house, I doubt not.

Yours ever,

John Tyndall.

Huxley replied:--]

Geological Survey of England and Wales, April 6, 1870.

My dear Tyndall,

DAMN
  the
      L
       e
        c
         t
          u
           r
            e
             s.

T.H.H.

That's a practical application of electricity for you.

[In June he writes to his wife, who has taken a sick child to the
seaside:--]

I hear a curious rumour (which is not for circulation), that Froude
and I have been proposed for D.C.L.'s at Commemoration, and that the
proposition has been bitterly and strongly opposed by Pusey. [Huxley
ultimately received his D.C.L. in 1885.] They say there has been a
regular row in Oxford about it. I suppose this is at the bottom of
Jowett's not writing to me. But I hope that he won't fancy that I
should be disgusted at the opposition and object to come [i.e. to pay
his regular visit to Balliol]. On the contrary, the more complete
Pusey's success, the more desirable it is that I should show my face
there. Altogether it is an awkward position, as I am supposed to know
nothing of what is going on.

[The situation is further developed in a letter to Darwin:--]

Jermyn Street, June 22, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

I sent the books to Queen Anne St. this morning. Pray keep them as
long as you like, as I am not using them.

I am greatly disgusted that you are coming up to London this week, as
we shall be out of town next Sunday. It is the rarest thing in the
world for us to be away, and you have pitched upon the one day. Cannot
we arrange some other day?

I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for
theirs. There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal
board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that
Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were
the blackest heretics out of the list proposed, and that he was glad
to assent to your being doctored, when he got back, in order to keep
out seven devils worse than that first!

Ever, oh Coryphaeus diabolicus, your faithful follower,

T.H. Huxley.

[The choice of a subject for his Presidential Address at the British
Association for 1870, a subject which, as he put it,] "has lain
chiefly in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere
grubs and mouldiness," [was suggested by a recent controversy upon the
origin of life, in which the experiments of Dr. Bastian, then
Professor of Pathological Anatomy at University College, London, which
seemed to prove spontaneous generation, were shown by Professor
Tyndall to contain a flaw. Huxley had naturally been deeply interested
from the first; he had been consulted by Dr. Bastian, and, I believe,
had advised him not to publish until he had made quite sure of his
ground. This question and the preparation of the course of Elementary
Biology [See below.] led him to carry on a series of investigations
lasting over two years, which took shape in a paper upon "Penicillium,
Torula, and Bacterium", first read in Section D at the British
Association, 1870 ("Quarterly Journal of Micr. Science" 1870 10 pages
355-362.); and in his article on "Yeast" in the "Contemporary Review"
for December 1871. He laboriously repeated Pasteur's experiments, and
for years a quantity of flasks and cultures used in this work remained
at South Kensington, until they were destroyed in the eighties. Of
this work Sir J. Hooker writes to him:--

You have made an immense leap in the association of forms, and I
cannot but suppose you approach the final solution...

I have always fancied that it was rather brains and boldness, than
eyes or microscopes that the mycologists wanted, and that there was
more brains in Berkeley's [Reverend M.J. Berkeley.] crude discoveries
than in the very best of the French and German microscopic
verifications of them, who filch away the credit of them from under
Berkeley's nose, and pooh-pooh his reasoning, but for which we should
be, as we were.

In his Presidential Address, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis" ("Collected
Essays" 8 page 229), he discussed the rival theories of spontaneous
generation and the universal derivation of life from precedent life,
and professed his belief, as an act of philosophic faith, that at some
remote period, life had arisen out of inanimate matter, though there
was no evidence that anything of the sort had occurred recently, the
germ theory explaining many supposed cases of spontaneous generation.
The history of the subject, indeed, showed] "the great tragedy of
Science--the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact--which
is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers," and
recalled the warning "that it is one thing to refute a proposition,
and another to prove the truth of a doctrine which, implicitly or
explicitly, contradicts that proposition."

[Two letters to Dr. Dohrn refer to this address and to the meeting of
the Association.]

Jermyn Street, April 30, 1870.

My dear Whirlwind,

I have received your two letters; and I was just revolving in my mind
how best to meet your wishes in regard to the very important project
mentioned in the first, when the second arrived and put me at rest.

I hope I need not say how heartily I enter into all your views, and
how glad I shall be to see your plan for "Stations" carried into
effect. [Dr. Dohrn succeeded in establishing such a zoological
"station" at Naples.] Nothing could have a greater influence upon the
progress of zoology.

A plan was set afoot here some time ago to establish a great marine
Aquarium at Brighton by means of a company. They asked me to be their
President, but I declined, on the ground that I did not desire to
become connected with any commercial undertaking. What has become of
the scheme I do not know, but I doubt whether it would be of any use
to you, even if any connection could be established.

As soon as you have any statement of your project ready, send it to me
and I will take care that it is brought prominently before the British
public so as to stir up their minds. And then we will have a regular
field-day about it in Section D at Liverpool.

Let me know your new ideas about insects and vertebrata as soon as
possible, and I promise to do my best to pull them to pieces. What
between Kowalesky and his Ascidians, Miklucho-Maclay [A Russian
naturalist, and close friend of Haeckel's, who later adventured
himself alone among the cannibals of New Guinea.] and his Fish-brains,
and you and your Arthropods, I am becoming schwindelsuchtig, and spend
my time mainly in that pious ejaculation "Donner and Blitz," in which,
as you know, I seek relief. Then there is our Bastian who is making
living things by the following combination:--

Prescription: Ammoniae Carbonatis
              Sodae Phosphatis
              Aquae destillatae
                 quantum sufficit
              Caloris 150 degrees Centigrade
              Vacui perfectissimi
              Patientiae.

Transubstantiation will be nothing to this if it turns out to be true,
and you may go and tell your neighbour Januarius to shut up his shop
as the heretics mean to outbid him.

Now I think that the best service I can render to all you enterprising
young men is to turn devil's advocate, and do my best to pick holes in
your work.

By the way, Miklucho-Maclay has been here; I have seen a good deal of
him, and he strikes me as a man of very considerable capacity and
energy. He was to return to Jena to-day.

My friend Herbert Spencer will be glad to learn that you appreciate
his book. I have been HIS devil's advocate for a number of years, and
there is no telling how many brilliant speculations I have been the
means of choking in an embryonic state.

My wife does not know that I am writing to you, or she would say
apropos of your last paragraph that you are an entirely unreasonable
creature in your notions of how friendship should be manifested, and
that you make no allowances for the oppression and exhaustion of the
work entailed by what Jean Paul calls a "Tochtervolles Haus." I hope I
may live to see you with at least ten children, and then my wife and I
will be avenged. Our children will be married and settled by that
time, and we shall have time to write every day and get very wroth
when you do not reply immediately.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

All are well, the children so grown you will not know them.

July 18, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

Notwithstanding the severe symptoms of "Tochterkrankheit" under which
I labour, I find myself equal to reply to your letter.

The British Association meets in September on the 14th day of that
month, which falls on a Wednesday. Of course, if you come you shall be
provided for by the best specimen of Liverpool hospitality. We have
ample provision for the entertainment of the "distinguished
foreigner."

Will you be so good as to be my special ambassador with Haeckel and
Gegenbauer, and tell them the same thing? It would give me and all of
us particular pleasure to see them and to take care of them.

But I am afraid that this wretched war will play the very deuce with
our foreign friends. If you Germans do not give that crowned swindler,
whose fall I have been looking for ever since the coup d'etat, such a
blow as he will never recover from, I will never forgive you. Public
opinion in England is not worth much, but at present, it is entirely
against France. Even the "Times," which generally contrives to be on
the baser side of a controversy, is at present on the German side. And
my daughters announced to me yesterday that they had converted a young
friend of theirs from the French to the German side, which is one
gained for you. All look forward with great pleasure to seeing you in
the autumn.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[In addition to this address on September 14, he read his paper on
"Penicillium," etc., in Section D on the 20th. Speaking on the 17th,
after a lecture of Sir J. Lubbock's on the "Social and Religious
Condition of the Lower Races of Mankind," he brought forward his own
experiences as to the practical results of the beliefs held by the
Australian savages, and from this passed to the increasing savagery of
the lower classes in great towns such as Liverpool, which was the
great political question of the future, and for which the only cure
lay in a proper system of education.

The savagery underlying modern civilisation was all the more vividly
before him, because one evening he, together with Sir J. Lubbock, Dr.
Bastian, and Mr. Samuelson, were taken by the chief of the detective
department round some of the worst slums in Liverpool. In thieves'
dens, doss houses, dancing saloons, enough of suffering and
criminality was seen to leave a very deep and painful impression. In
one of these places, a thieves' lodging-house, a drunken man with a
cut face accosted him and asked him whether he was a doctor. He said
"yes," whereupon the man asked him to doctor his face. He had been
fighting, and was terribly excited. Huxley tried to pacify him, but if
it had not been for the intervention of the detective, the man would
have assaulted him. Afterwards he asked the detective if he were not
afraid to go alone in these places, and got the significant answer,
"Lord bless you, sir, drink and disease take all the strength out of
them."

On the 21st, after the general meeting of the Association, which wound
up the proceedings, the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
presented a diploma of honorary membership and a gift of books to
Huxley, Sir G. Stokes, and Sir J. Hooker, the last three Presidents of
the British Association, and to Professors Tyndall and Rankine and Sir
J. Lubbock, the lecturers at Liverpool. Then Huxley was presented with
a mazer bowl lined with silver, made from part of one of the roof
timbers of the cottage occupied as his headquarters by Prince Rupert
during the siege of Liverpool. He was rather taken aback when he found
the bowl was filled with champagne, after a moment, however, he drank]
"success to the good old town of Liverpool," [and with a wave of his
hand, threw the rest on the floor, saying,] "I pour this as a libation
to the tutelary deities of the town."

[The same evening he was the guest of the Sphinx Club at dinner at the
Royal Hotel, his friend Mr. P.H. Rathbone being in the chair, and in
proposing the toast of the town and trade of Liverpool, declared that
commerce was a greater civiliser than all the religion and all the
science ever put together in the world, for it taught men to be
truthful and punctual and precise in the execution of their
engagements, and men who were truthful and punctual and precise in the
execution of their engagements had put their feet upon the first rung
of the ladder which led to moral and intellectual elevation.

There were the usual clerical attacks on the address, among the rest a
particularly violent one from a Unitarian pulpit. Writing to Mr.
Samuelson on October 5 he says:--]

Be not vexed on account of the godly. They will have their way. I
found Mr. --'s sermon awaiting me on my return home. It is an able
paper, but like the rest of his cloth he will not take the trouble to
make himself acquainted with the ideas of the man whom he opposes. At
least that is the case if he imagines he brings me under the range of
his guns.

[On October 2 he writes to Tyndall:--]

I have not yet thanked you properly for your great contribution to the
success of our meeting [i.e. his lecture "On the Scientific Uses of
the Imagination"]. I was nervous over the passage about the clergy,
but those confounded parsons seem to me to let you say anything, while
they bully me for a word or a phrase. It's the old story, "one man may
steal a horse while the other may not look over the wall."

[Tyndall was not to be outdone, and replied:--

The parsons know very well that I mean kindness; if I correct them I
do it in love and not in wrath.

One more extract from a letter to Dr. Dohrn, under date of November
17. The first part is taken up with a long and detailed description of
the best English microscopes and their price, for Dr. Dohrn wished to
get one; and my father volunteered to procure it for him. The rest of
the letter has a more general interest as giving his views on the
great struggle between France and Germany then in progress, his
distrust of militarism, and above all, his hatred of lying, political
as much as any other:--]

This wretched war is doing infinite mischief; but I do not see what
Germany can do now but carry it out to the end.

I began to have some sympathy with the French after Sedan, but the
Republic lies harder than the Empire did, and the whole country seems
to me to be rotten to the core. The only figure which stands out with
anything like nobility or dignity, on the French side, is that of the
Empress, and she is only a second-rate Marie-Antoinette. There is no
Roland, no Corday, and apparently no MAN of any description.

The Russian row is beginning, and the rottenness of English
administration will soon, I suppose, have an opportunity of displaying
itself. Bad days are, I am afraid, in store for all of us, and the
worst for Germany if it once becomes thoroughly bitten by the military
mad dog.

The "happy family" is flourishing and was afflicted, even over its
breakfast, when I gave out the news that you had been ill.

The wife desires her best remembrances, and we all hope you are
better.

[The high pressure under which Huxley worked, and his abundant output,
continued undiminished through the autumn and winter. Indeed, he was
so busy that he postponed his Lectures to Working Men in London from
October to February 1871. On October 3 he lectured in Leicester on
"What is to be Learned from a Piece of Coal," a parallel lecture to
that of 1868 on "A Piece of Chalk." On the 17th and 24th he lectured
at Birmingham on "Extinct Animals intermediate between Reptiles and
Birds"--a subject which he had made peculiarly his own by long study;
and on December 29 he was at Bradford, and lectured at the
Philosophical Institute upon "The Formation of Coal" ("Collected
Essays" 8.).

He was also busy with two Royal Commissions; still, at whatever cost
of the energy and time due to his own investigations and those
additional labours by which he increased his none too abundant income,
he felt it his duty, in the interests of his ideal of education, to
come forward as a candidate for the newly-instituted School Board for
London. This was the practical outcome of the rising interest in
education all over the country; on its working, he felt, depended
momentous issues--the fostering of the moral and physical well-being
of the nation; the quickening of its intelligence and the maintenance
of its commercial supremacy. Withal, he desired to temper
"book-learning" with something of the direct knowledge of nature: on
the one hand, as an admirable instrument of education, if properly
applied; on the other, as preparing the way for an attitude of mind
which could appreciate the reasons for the immense changes already
beginning to operate in human thought.

Moreover, he possessed a considerable knowledge of the working of
elementary education throughout the country, owing to his experience
as examiner under the Science and Art Department, the establishment of
which he describes as "a measure which came into existence unnoticed,
but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more importance to the
welfare of the people than many political changes over which the noise
of battle has rent the air" ("Scientific Education" 1869; "Collected
Essays" 3 page 131.)

Accordingly, though with health uncertain, and in the midst of
exacting occupations, he felt that he ought not to stand aside at so
critical a moment, and offered himself for election in the Marylebone
division with a secret sense that rejection would in many ways be a
great relief.

The election took place on November 29, and Huxley came out second on
the poll. He had had neither the means nor the time for a regular
canvass of the electors. He was content to address several public
meetings, and leave the result to the interest he could awaken amongst
his hearers. His views were further brought before the public by the
action of the editor of the "Contemporary Review," who, before the
election, "took upon himself, in what seemed to him to be the public
interest," to send to the newspapers an extract from Huxley's article,
"The School Boards: what they can do, and what they may do," which was
to appear in the December number.

In this article will be found ("Collected Essays" 3 page 374) a full
account of the programme which he laid down for himself, and which to
a great extent he saw carried into effect, in its fourfold
division--of physical drill and discipline, not only to improve the
physique of the children, but as an introduction to all other sorts of
training--of domestic training, especially for girls--of education in
the knowledge of moral and social laws and the engagement of the
affections for what is good and against what is evil--and finally, of
intellectual training. And it should be noted that he did not only
regard intellectual training from the utilitarian point of view; he
insisted, e.g. on the value of reading for amusement as] "one of its
most valuable uses to hard-worked people."

[Much as he desired that this intellectual training should be
efficient, the most cursory perusal of this article will show how far
he placed the moral training above the intellectual, which, by itself,
would only turn the gutter-child into] "the subtlest of all the beasts
of the field," [and how wide of the mark is the cartoon at this period
representing him as the Professor whose panacea for the ragged
children was to] "cram them full of nonsense."

[In the third section are also to be found his arguments for the
retention of Bible-reading in the elementary schools. He reproached
extremists of either party for confounding the science, theology, with
the affection, religion, and either crying for more theology under the
name of religion, or demanding the abolition of] "religious" [teaching
in order to get rid of theology, a step which he likens to] "burning
your ship to get rid of the cockroaches."

[As regards his actual work on the Board, I must express my thanks to
Dr. J.H. Gladstone for his kindness in supplementing my information
with an account based partly on his own long experience of the Board,
partly on the reminiscences of members contemporary with my father.

The Board met first on December 15, for the purpose of electing a
Chairman. As a preliminary, Huxley proposed and carried a motion that
no salary be attached to the post. He was himself one of the four
members proposed for the Chairmanship; but the choice of the Board
fell upon Lord Lawrence. In the words of Dr. Gladstone:--

Huxley at once took a prominent part in the proceedings, and continued
to do so till the beginning of the year 1872, when ill-health
compelled him to retire.

At first there was much curiosity both inside and outside the Board as
to how Huxley would work with the old educationists, the clergy,
dissenting ministers, and the miscellaneous body of eminent men that
comprised the first Board. His antagonism to many of the methods
employed in elementary schools was well known from his various
discourses, which had been recently published together under the title
of "Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews." I watched his course with
interest at the time; but for the purpose of this sketch I have lately
sought information from such of the old members of the Board as are
still living, especially the earl of Harrowby, Bishop Barry, the
Reverend Dr. Angus, and Mr. Edward North Buxton, together with Mr.
Croad, the Clerk of the Board. They soon found proof of his great
energy, and his power of expressing his views in clear and forcible
language; but they also found that with all his strong convictions and
lofty ideals he was able and willing to enter into the views of
others, and to look at a practical question from its several sides. He
could construct as well as criticise. Having entered a public arena
somewhat late in life, and being of a sensitive nature, he had
scarcely acquired that calmness and pachydermatous quality which is
needful for one's personal comfort; but his colleagues soon came to
respect him as a perfectly honest antagonist or supporter, and one who
did not allow differences of conviction to interfere with friendly
intercourse.

The various sections of the clerical party indeed looked forward with
great apprehension to his presence on the Board, but the more liberal
amongst them ventured to find ground for hoping that they and he would
not be utterly opposed so far as the work of practical organisation
was concerned, in the declaration of his belief that true education
was impossible without "religion," of which he declared that all that
has an unchangeable reality in it is constituted by the love of some
ethical ideal to govern and guide conduct,] "together with the awe and
reverence, which have no kinship with base fear, but rise whenever one
tries to pierce below the surface of things, whether they be material
or spiritual." [And in fact a cleavage took place between him and the
seven extreme "secularists" on the Board (the seven champions of
unchristendom, as their opponents dubbed them) on the question of the
reading of the Bible in schools (see below (Bishop Barry calls
particular attention to his attitude on this point, "because," he
says, "it is (I think) often misunderstood. In the "Life of the Right
Honourable W.H. Smith" (for instance), published not long ago, Huxley
is supposed, as a matter of course to have been the leader of the
Secularist party.")

One of the earliest proposals laid before the Board was a resolution
to open the meetings with prayer. To this considerable opposition was
offered; but a bitter debate was averted by Huxley pointing out that
the proposal was ultra vires, inasmuch as under the Act constituting
the Board the business for which they were empowered to meet did not
include prayer. Hereupon a requisition--in which he himself
joined--was made to allow the use of a committee-room to those who
wished to unite in a short service before the weekly meetings, an
arrangement which has continued to the present time.

At the second meeting, on December 21, he gave notice of a motion to
appoint a committee to consider and report upon the scheme of
education to be adopted in the Board Schools.

This motion came up for consideration on February 15, 1871. In
introducing it, he said that such a committee ought to consider:--]

First, the general nature and relations of the schools which may come
under the Board. Secondly, the amount of time to be devoted to
educational purposes in such schools; and Thirdly, the subject-matter
of the instruction or education, or teaching, or training, which is to
be given in these schools.

[But this, by itself, he continued, would be incomplete. At one end of
the scale he advocated Infant schools, and urged a connection with the
excellent work of the Ragged schools. At the other end he desired to
see continuation schools, and ultimately some scheme of technical
education. A comprehensive scheme, indeed, would involve an
educational ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby children
of exceptional ability might reach the place for which nature had
fitted them.

The subject matter of elementary instruction must be limited by what
was practicable and desirable. The revised code had done too little;
it had taught the use of the tools of learning, while denying all
sorts of knowledge on which to exercise them afterwards. And here
incidentally he repudiated the notion that the English child was
stupid; on the contrary, he thought the two finest intellects in
Europe at this time were the English and the Italian.

In particular he advocated the teaching of] "the first elements of
physical science"; "by which I do not mean teaching astronomy and the
use of the globes, and the rest of the abominable trash--but a little
instruction of the child in what is the nature of common things about
him; what their properties are, and in what relation this actual body
of man stands to the universe outside of it." "There is no form of
knowledge or instruction in which children take greater interest."

[Drawing and music, too, he considered, should be taught in every
elementary school, not to produce painters or musicians, but as
civilising arts. History, except the most elementary notions, he put
out of court, as too advanced for children.

Finally, he proposed a list of members to serve on the Education
Committee in a couple of sentences with a humorous twist in them which
disarmed criticism.] "On a former occasion I was accused of having a
proclivity in favour of the clergy, and recollecting this, I have only
given them in this instance a fair proportion of the representation.
If, however, I have omitted any gentleman who thinks he ought to be on
the committee, I can only assure him that above all others I should
have been glad to put him on."

[That day week the committee was elected, about a third of the members
of the Board being chosen to serve on it. At the same meeting, Dr.
Gladstone continues:--

Mr. W.H. Smith, the well-known member of Parliament, proposed, and Mr.
Samuel Morley, M.P., seconded, a resolution in favour of religious
teaching--"That, in the schools provided by the Board, the Bible shall
be read, and there shall be given therefrom such explanations and such
instruction in the principles of religion and morality as are suited
to the capacities of children," with certain provisos. Several
antagonistic amendments were proposed; but Professor Huxley gave his
support to Mr. Smith's resolutions, which, however, he thought might
be trimmed and amended in a way that the Reverend Dr. Angus had
suggested. His speech, defining his own position, was a very
remarkable one. He said] "it was assumed in the public mind that this
question of religious instruction was a little family quarrel between
the different sects of Protestantism on the one hand, and the old
Catholic Church on the other. Side by side with this much shivered and
splintered Protestantism of theirs, and with the united fabric of the
Catholic Church (not so strong temporally as she used to be, otherwise
he might not have been addressing them at that moment), there was a
third party growing up into very considerable and daily increasing
significance, which had nothing to do with either of those great
parties, and which was pushing its own way independent of them, having
its own religion and its own morality, which rested in no way whatever
on the foundations of the other two." [He thought that] "the action of
the Board should be guided and influenced very much by the
consideration of this third great aspect of things," [which he called
the scientific aspect, for want of a better name.]

"It had been very justly said that they had a great mass of low
half-instructed population which owed what little redemption from
ignorance and barbarism it possessed mainly to the efforts of the
clergy of the different denominations. Any system of gaining the
attention of these people to these matters must be a system connected
with, or not too rudely divorced from their own system of belief. He
wanted regulations, not in accordance with what he himself thought was
right, but in the direction in which thought was moving." [He wanted
an elastic system, that did not oppose any obstacle to the free play
of the public mind.

Huxley voted against all the proposed amendments, and in favour of Mr.
Smith's motion. There were only three who voted against it; while the
three Roman Catholic members refrained from voting. This basis of
religious instruction, practically unaltered, has remained the law of
the Board ever since.

There was a controversy in the papers, between Professor Huxley and
the Reverend W.H. Fremantle, as to the nature of the explanations of
the Bible lessons. Huxley maintained that it should be purely
grammatical, geographical, and historical in its nature; Fremantle
that it should include some species of distinct religious teaching,
but not of a denominational character. (Cp. extract from Lord
Shaftesbury's journal about this correspondence ("Life and Work of
Lord Shaftesbury" 3 282). "Professor Huxley has this definition of
morality and religion:] 'Teach a child what is wise, that is morality.
Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is RELIGION!' Let no one
henceforth despair of making things clear and of giving
explanations!")

[In taking up this position, Huxley expressly disclaimed any desire
for a mere compromise to smooth over a difficulty. He supported what
appeared to be the only workable plan under the circumstances, though
it was not his ideal; for he would not have used the Bible as the
agency for introducing the religious and ethical idea into education
if he had been dealing with a fresh and untouched population.

His appreciation of the literary and historical value of the Bible,
and the effect it was likely to produce upon the school children,
circumstanced as they were, is sometimes misunderstood to be an
endorsement of the vulgar idea of it. But it always remained his
belief] "that the principle of strict secularity in State education is
sound, and must eventually prevail." [(As a result of some remarks of
Mr. Clodd's on the matter in "Pioneers of Evolution," a correspondent,
some time after, wrote to him as follows:--

"In the report upon State Education in New Zealand, 1895, drawn up by
R. Laishly, the following occurs, page 13:--'Professor Huxley gives me
leave to state his opinion to be that the principle of strict
secularity in State education is sound, and must eventually prevail.'"

His views on dogmatic teaching in State schools, may be gathered
further from two letters at the period when an attempt was being made
to upset the so-called compromise.

The first appeared in the "Times" of April 29, 1893:--]

Sir,

In a leading article of your issue of to-day you state, with perfect
accuracy, that I supported the arrangement respecting religious
instruction agreed to by the London School Board in 1871, and hitherto
undisturbed. But you go on to say that "the persons who framed the
rule" intended it to include definite teaching of such theological
dogmas as the Incarnation.

I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers of the
rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such interpretation
could fairly be put upon it, I should have opposed the arrangement to
the best of my ability.

In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an article in the
"Contemporary Review," entitled "The School Boards--what they can do
and what they may do," in which I argued that the terms of the
Education Act excluded such teaching as it is now proposed to include.
And I support my contention by the following citation from the speech
delivered by Mr. Forster at the Birkbeck Institution in 1870:--

["I have the fullest confidence that in the reading and explaining of
the Bible what the children will be taught will be the great truths of
Christian life and conduct, which all of us desire they should know,
and that no efforts will be made to cram into their poor little minds
theological dogmas which their tender age prevents them from
understanding."

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

T.H. Huxley.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 28.

[The second is to a correspondent who wrote to ask him whether
adhesion to the compromise had not rendered nonsensical the teaching
given in a certain lesson upon the finding of the youthful Jesus in
the temple, when, after they had read the verse, "How is it that ye
sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" the
teacher asked the children the name of Jesus' father and mother, and
accepted the simple answer, Joseph and Mary. Thus the point of the
story, whether regarded as reality or myth, is slurred over, the
result is perplexity, the teaching, in short, is bad, apart from all
theory as to the value of the Bible.

In a letter to the "Chronicle," which he forwarded, this correspondent
suggested a continuation of the "incriminated lesson":--

Suppose, then, that an intelligent child of seven, who has just heard
it read out that Jesus excused Himself to his parents for disappearing
for three days, on the ground that He was about His father's business,
and has then learned that His father's name was Joseph, had said,
"Please, teacher, was this the Jesus that gave us the Lord's Prayer?"
The teacher answers, "Yes." and suppose the child rejoins, "And is it
to His father Joseph that he bids us pray when we say Our Father?" But
there are boys of nine, ten, eleven years in Board Schools, and many
such boys are intelligent enough to take up the subject of the lesson
where the instructor left it. "Please, teacher," asks one of these,
"what business was it that Jesus had to do for His father Joseph? Had
He stopped behind to get a few orders? Was it true that He had been
about Joseph's business? And, if it was not, did He not deserve to be
punished?"

Huxley replied on October 16, 1894:--]

Dear Sir,

I am one with you in hating "hush up" as I do all other forms of
lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise of 1871 was not a
"hush-up." If I had taken it to be such I should have refused to have
anything to do with it. And more specifically, I said in a letter to
the "Times" (see "Times," 29th April 1893) at the beginning of the
present controversy, that if I had thought the compromise involved the
obligatory teaching of such dogmas as the Incarnation I should have
opposed it.

There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position in this
matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the School Board
written by me before my election in 1870, I think you will find that I
anticipated the pith of the present discussion.

The persons who agreed to the compromise, did exactly what all sincere
men who agree to compromise, do. For the sake of the enormous
advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent education to several
generations of the people, they accepted what was practically an
armistice in respect of certain matters about which the contending
parties were absolutely irreconcilable.

The clericals have now "denounced" the treaty, doubtless thinking they
can get a new one more favourable to themselves.

From my point of view, I am not sure that it might not be well for
them to succeed, so that the sweep into space which would befall them
in the course of the next twenty-three years might be complete and
final.

As to the case you put to me--permit me to continue the dialogue in
another shape.

Boy.--Please, teacher, if Joseph was not Jesus' father and God was,
why did Mary say, "Thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"? How
could God not know where Jesus was? How could He be sorry?

Teacher.--When Jesus says Father, he means God; but when Mary says
father, she means Joseph.

Boy.--Then Mary didn't know God was Jesus' father?

Teacher.--Oh, yes, she did (reads the story of the Annunciation).

Boy.--It seems to me very odd that Mary used language which she knew
was not true, and taught her son to call Joseph father. But there's
another odd thing about her. If she knew her child was God's son, why
was she alarmed about his safety? Surely she might have trusted God to
look after his own son in a crowd.

I know of children of six and seven who are quite capable of following
out such a line of inquiry with all the severe logic of a moral sense
which has not been sophisticated by pious scrubbing.

I could tell you of stranger inquiries than these which have been made
by children in endeavouring to understand the account of the
miraculous conception.

Whence I conclude that even in the interests of what people are
pleased to call Christianity (though it is my firm conviction that
Jesus would have repudiated the doctrine of the Incarnation as warmly
as that of the Trinity), it may be well to leave things as they are.

All this is for your own eye. There is nothing in substance that I
have not said publicly, but I do not feel called upon to say it over
again, or get mixed up in an utterly wearisome controversy.

I am, yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[However, he was unsuccessful in his proposal that a selection be made
of passages for reading from the Bible; the Board refused to become
censors. On May 10 he raised the question of the diversion from the
education of poor children of charitable bequests, which ought to be
applied to the augmentation of the school fund. In speaking to this
motion he said that the long account of errors and crimes of the
Catholic Church was greatly redeemed by the fact that that Church had
always borne in mind the education of the poor, and had carried out
the great democratic idea that the soul of every man was of the same
value in the eyes of his Maker.

The next matter of importance in which he took part was on June 14,
when the Committee on the Scheme of Education presented its first
report. Dr. Gladstone writes:--

It was a very voluminous document. The Committee had met every week,
and, in the words of Huxley,] "what it had endeavoured to do, was to
obtain some order and system and uniformity in important matters,
whilst in comparatively unimportant matters they thought some play
should be given for the activity of the bodies of men into whose hands
the management of the various schools should be placed." [The
recommendations were considered on June 21 and July 12, and passed
without any material alterations or additions. They were very much the
same as existed in the best elementary schools of the period. Huxley's
chief interest, it may be surmised, was in the subjects of
instruction. It was passed that, in infants' schools there should be
the Bible, reading, writing, arithmetic, object lessons of a simple
character, with some such exercise of the hands and eyes as is given
in the Kindergarten system, music, and drill. In junior and senior
schools the subjects of instruction were divided into two classes,
essential and discretionary, the essentials being the Bible, and the
principles of religion and morality, reading, writing, and arithmetic,
English grammar and composition, elementary geography, and elementary
social economy, history of England, the principles of book-keeping in
senior schools, with mensuration in senior boys' schools. All through
the six years there were to be systematised object lessons, embracing
a course of elementary instruction in physical science, and serving as
an introduction to the science examinations conducted by the Science
and Art department. An analogous course of instruction was adopted for
elementary evening schools. In moving] "that the formation of science
and art classes in connection with public elementary schools be
encouraged and facilitated," [Huxley contended strongly for it,
saying,] "The country could not possibly commit a greater error than
in establishing schools in which the direct applications of science
and art were taught before those who entered the classes were grounded
in the principles of physical science." [In advocating object lessons
he said,] "The position that science was now assuming, not only in
relation to practical life, but to thought, was such that those who
remained entirely ignorant of even its elementary facts were in a
wholly unfair position as regarded the world of thought and the world
of practical life." [It was, moreover,] "the only real foundation for
technical education."

[Other points in which he was specially concerned were, that the
universal teaching of drawing was accepted, against an amendment
excluding girls; that domestic economy was made a discretionary
substitute for needlework and cutting-out; while he spoke in defence
of Latin as a discretionary subject, alternatively with a modern
language. It was true that he would not have proposed it in the first
instance, not because a little Latin is a bad thing, but for fear of]
"overloading the boat." [But, on the other hand, there was great
danger if education were not thrown open to all without restriction.
If it be urged that a man should be content with the state of life to
which he is called, the obvious retort is, How do you know what is
your state of life, unless you try what you are called to? There is no
more frightful] "sitting on the safety valve" [than in preventing men
of ability from having the means of rising to the positions for which
they, by their talents and industry, could qualify themselves.

Further, although the committee as a whole recommended that
discretionary subjects should be extras, he wished them to be covered
by the general payment, in which sense the report was amended.

This Education Committee (proceeds Dr. Gladstone) continued to sit,
and on November 30 brought up a report in favour of the Prussian
system of separate classrooms, to be tried in one school as an
experiment. This reads curiously now that it has become the system
almost universally adopted in the London Board Schools.

In regard to examinations Huxley strongly supported the view that the
teaching in all subjects, secular or sacred, should be periodically
tested.

On December 13, Huxley raised the question whether the selection of
books and apparatus should be referred to his Committee or to the
School Management Committee, and on January 10 following, a small
sub-committee for that object was formed. Almost immediately after
this he retired from the Board.

One more speech of his, which created a great stir at the time, must
be referred to, namely his expression of undisguised hostility to the
system of education maintained by the Ultramontane section of the
Roman Catholics. (Cp. "Scientific Education" "Collected Essays" 3 page
111.) In October the bye-laws came up for consideration. One of them
provided that the Board should pay over direct to denominational
schools the fees for poor children. This he opposed on the ground that
it would lead to repeated contests on the Board, and further, might be
used as a tool by the Ultramontanes for their own purposes. Believing
that their system as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete
possession of the minds of those whom they taught or controlled, was
destructive to all that was highest in the nature of mankind, and
inconsistent with intellectual and political liberty, he considered it
his earnest duty to oppose all measures which would lead to assisting
the Ultramontanes in their purpose.

Hereupon he was vehemently attacked, for example, in the "Times" for
his "injudicious and even reprehensible tone" which "aggravated the
difficulties his opponents might have in giving way to him." Was this,
it was asked, the way to get Roman Catholic children to the Board
schools? Was it not an abandonment of the ideal of compulsory
education?

It is hardly necessary to point out that the question was not between
the compulsory inclusion or exclusion of poor children, but between
their admission at the cost of the Board to schools under the Board's
own control or outside it. In any case the children of Roman Catholics
were not likely to get their own doctrines taught in Board Schools,
and without this they declared they would rather go without education
at all.

Early in 1872 Huxley retired. For a year he had continued at this
task; then his health broke down, and feeling that he had done his
part, from no personal motives of ambition, but rather at some cost to
himself, for what he held to be national ends, he determined not to
resume the work after the rest which was to restore him to health, and
made his resignation definite.

Dr. Gladstone writes:--

On February 7 a letter of resignation was received from him, stating
that he was] "reluctantly compelled, both on account of his health and
his private affairs, to insist on giving up his seat at the Board."
[The Reverend Dr. Rigg, Canon Miller, Mr. Charles Reed, and Lord
Lawrence expressed their deep regret. In the words of Dr. Rigg, "they
were losing one of the most valuable members of the Board, not only
because of his intellect and trained acuteness, but because of his
knowledge of every subject connected with culture and education, and
because of his great fairness and impartiality with regard to all
subjects that came under his observation."

Though Huxley quitted the Board after only fourteen months' service,
the memory of his words and acts combined to influence it long
afterwards. In various ways he expressed his opinion on educational
matters, publicly and privately. He frequently talked with me on the
subject at the Athenaeum Club, and shortly after my election to the
Board in 1873, I find it recorded in my diary that he insisted
strongly on the necessity of our building infants' schools,--] "People
may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is
the moral teaching."

As to the sub-committee on books and apparatus, it did little at
first, but at the beginning of the second Board, 1873, it became
better organised under the presidency of the Reverend Benjamin Waugh.
At the commencement of the next triennial term I became the chairman,
and continued to be such for eighteen years. It was our duty to put
into practice the scheme of instruction which Huxley was mainly
instrumental in settling. We were thus able indirectly to improve both
the means and methods of teaching. The subjects of instruction have
all been retained in the Curriculum of the London School Board,
except, perhaps, "mensuration" and "social economy." The most
important developments and additions have been in the direction of
educating the hand and eye. Kindergarten methods have been promoted.
Drawing, on which Huxley laid more stress than his colleagues
generally did, has been enormously extended and greatly revolutionised
in its methods. Object lessons and elementary science have been
introduced everywhere, while shorthand, the use of tools for boys,
cookery and domestic economy for girls are becoming essentials in our
schools. Evening continuation schools have lately been widely
extended. Thus the impulse given by Huxley in the first months of the
Board's existence has been carried forward by others, and is now
affecting the minds of the half million of boys and girls in the Board
Schools of London, and indirectly the still greater number in other
schools throughout the land.

I must further express my thanks to Bishop Barry for permission to
make use of the following passages from the notes contributed by him
to Dr. Gladstone:--

I had the privilege of being a member of his committee for defining
the curriculum of study, and here also--the religious question being
disposed of--I was able to follow much the same line as his, and I
remember being struck not only with his clear-headed ability, but with
his strong commonsense, as to what was useful and practicable, and the
utter absence in him of doctrinaire aspiration after ideal
impossibilities. There was (I think) very little under his
chairmanship of strongly-accentuated difference of opinion.

In his action on the Board generally I was struck with these three
characteristics:--First, his remarkable power of speaking--I may say,
of oratory--not only on his own scientific subjects, but on all the
matters, many of which were of great practical interest and touched
the deepest feelings, which came before the Board at that critical
time. Had he chosen--and we heard at that time that he was considering
whether he should choose--to enter political life, it would certainly
have made him a great power, possibly a leader, in that sphere. Next,
what constantly appears in his writings, even those of the most
polemical kind--a singular candour in recognising truths which might
seen to militate against his own position, and a power of
understanding and respecting his adversaries' opinions, if only they
were strongly and conscientiously held. I remember his saying on one
occasion that in his earlier experience of sickness and suffering, he
had found that the most effective helpers of the higher humanity were
not the scientist or the philosopher, but] "the parson, and the
sister, and the Bible woman." [Lastly, the strong commonsense, which
enabled him to see what was] "within the range of practical politics,"
[and to choose for the cause which he had at heart the line of least
resistance, and to check, sometimes to rebuke, intolerant obstinacy
even on the side which he was himself inclined to favour. These
qualities over and above his high intellectual ability made him, for
the comparatively short time that he remained on the Board, one of its
leading members.

No less vivid is the impression left, after many years, upon another
member of the first School Board, the Reverend Benjamin Waugh, whose
life-long work for the children is so well known. From his
recollections, written for the use of Professor Gladstone, it is my
privilege to quote the following paragraphs:--

I was drawn to him most, and was influenced by him most, because of
his attitude to a child. He was on the Board to establish schools for
children. His motive in every argument, in all the fun and ridicule he
indulged in, and in his occasional anger, was the child. He resented
the idea that schools were to train either congregations for churches
or hands for factories. He was on the Board as a friend of children.
What he sought to do for the child was for the child's sake, that it
might live a fuller, truer, worthier life. If ever his great tolerance
with men with whom he differed on general principles seemed to fail
him for a moment, it was because they seemed to him to seek other ends
than the child for its own sake...

His contempt for the idea of the world into which we were born being
either a sort of clergyhouse or a market-place, was too complete to be
marked by any eagerness. But in view of the market-place idea he was
the less calm.

Like many others who had not yet come to know in what high esteem he
held the moral and spiritual nature of children, I had thought he was
the advocate of mere secular studies, alike in the nation's schools,
and in its families. But by contact with him, this soon became an
impossible idea. In very early days on the Board a remark I had made
to a mutual friend which implied this unjust idea was repeated to
him.] "Tell Waugh that he talks too fast," [was his message to me. I
was not long in finding out that this was a very just reproof...

The two things in his character of which I became most conscious by
contact with him, were his childlikeness and his consideration for
intellectual inferiors. His arguments were as transparently honest as
the arguments of a child. They might or might not seem wrong to
others, but they were never untrue to himself. Whether you agreed with
them or not, they always added greatly to the charm of his
personality. Whether his face was lighted by his careless and playful
humour or his great brows were shadowed by anger, he was alike
expressing himself with the honesty of a child. What he counted
iniquity he hated, and what he counted righteous he loved with the
candour of a child...

Of his consideration for intellectual inferiors I, of course, needed a
large share, and it was never wanting. Towering as was his
intellectual strength and keenness above me, indeed above the whole of
the rest of the members of the Board, he did not condescend to me. The
result was never humiliating. It had no pain of any sort in it. He was
too spontaneous and liberal with his consideration to seem conscious
that he was showing any. There were many men of religious note upon
the Board, of some of whom I could not say the same.

In his most trenchant attacks on what he deemed wrong in principles,
he never descended to attack either the sects which held them or the
individuals who supported them, even though occasionally much
provocation was given him. He might not care for peace with some of
the theories represented on the Board, but he had certainly and at all
times great good-will to men.

As a speaker he was delightful. Few, clear, definite, and calm as
stars were the words he spoke. Nobody talked whilst he was speaking.
There were no tricks in his talk. He did not seem to be trying to
persuade you of something. What convinced him, that he transferred to
others. He made no attempt to misrepresent those opposed to him. He
sought only to let them know himself...Even the sparkle of his humour,
like the sparkle of a diamond, was of the inevitable in him, and was
as fair as it was enjoyable.

As one who has tried to serve children, I look back upon having fallen
in with Mr. Huxley as one of the many fortunate circumstances of my
life. It taught me the importance of making acquaintance with facts,
and of studying the laws of them. Under his influence it was that I
most of all came to see the practical value of a single eye to those
in any pursuit of life. I saw what effect they had on emotions of
charity and sentiments of justice, and what simplicity and grandeur
they gave to appeals.

My last conversation with him was at Eastbourne some time in 1887 or
1888. I was there on my society's business.] "Well, Waugh, you're
still busy about your babies," [was his greeting. "Yes," I responded
"and you are still busy about your pigs." One of the last discussions
at which he was present at the School Board for London had been on the
proximity of a piggery to a site for a school, and his attack on Mr.
Gladstone on the Gadarene swine had just been made in the "Nineteenth
Century."] "Do you still believe in Gladstone?" [he continued.] "That
man has the greatest intellect in Europe. He was born to be a leader
of men, and he has debased himself to be a follower of the masses. If
working men were to-day to vote by a majority that two and two made
five, to-morrow Gladstone would believe it, and find them reasons for
it which they had never dreamed of." [He said it slowly and with
sorrow.

Two more incidents are connected with his service on the School Board.
A wealthy friend wrote to him in the most honourable and delicate
terms, begging him, on public grounds, to accept 400 pounds sterling a
year to enable him to continue his work on the Board. He refused the
offer as simply and straightforwardly as it was made; his means,
though not large, were sufficient for his present needs.

Further, a good many people seemed to think that he meant to use the
School Board as a stalking horse for a political career. To one of
those who urged him to stand for Parliament, he replied thus:--]

November 18, 1871.

Dear Sir,

It has often been suggested to me that I should seek for a seat in the
House of Commons; indeed I have reason to think that many persons
suppose that I entered the London School Board simply as a road to
Parliament.

But I assure you that this supposition is entirely without foundation,
and that I have never seriously entertained any notion of the kind.

The work of the School Board involves me in no small sacrifices of
various kinds, but I went into it with my eyes open, and with the
clear conviction that it was worth while to make those sacrifices for
the sake of helping the Education Act into practical operation. A
year's experience has not altered that conviction; but now that the
most difficult, if not the most important, part of our work is done, I
begin to look forward with some anxiety to the time when I shall be
relieved of duties which so seriously interfere with what I regard as
my proper occupation.

No one can say what the future has in store for him, but at present I
know of no inducement, not even the offer of a seat in the House of
Commons, which would lead me, even temporarily and partially, to
forsake that work again.

I am, dear sir, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[I give here a letter to me from Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, who also
at one period was anxious to induce him to enter Parliament:--

Lexden Park, Colchester, 4th November, 1898.

Dear Mr. Huxley,

I have met men who seemed to me to possess powers of mind even greater
than those of your father--his friend Henry Smith for example; but I
never met any one who gave me the impression so much as he did, that
he would have gone to the front in any pursuit in which he had seen
fit to engage. Henry Smith had, in addition to his astonishing
mathematical genius, and his great talents as a scholar, a rare
faculty of persuasiveness. Your father used to speak with much
admiration and some amusement of the way in which he managed to get
people to take his view by appearing to take theirs; but he never
could have been a power in a popular assembly, nor have carried with
him by the force of his eloquence, great masses of men. I do not think
that your father, if he had entered the House of Commons and thrown
himself entirely into political life, would have been much behind
Gladstone as a debater, or Bright as an orator. Whether he had the
stamina which are required not only to reach but to retain a foremost
place in politics, is another question. The admirers of Prince
Bismarck would say that the daily prayer of the statesman should be
there "une bonne digestion et un mauvais coeur." "Le mauvais coeur"
does not appear to be "de toute necessite," but, assuredly, the "bonne
digestion" is. Given an adequate and equal amount of ability in two
men who enter the House of Commons together, it is the man of strong
digestion, drawing with it, as it usually does, good temper and power
of continuous application, who will go furthest. Gladstone, who was
inferior to your father in intellect, might have "given points" to the
Dragon of Wantley who devoured church steeples. Your father could
certainly not have done so, and in that respect was less well equipped
for a lifelong parliamentary struggle.

I should like to have seen these two pitted against each other with
that "substantial piece of furniture" between them behind which Mr.
Disraeli was glad to shelter himself. I should like to have heard them
discussing some subject which they both thoroughly understood. When
they did cross swords the contest was like nothing that has happened
in our times save the struggle at Omdurman. It was not so much a
battle as a massacre, for Gladstone had nothing but a bundle of
antiquated prejudices wherewith to encounter your father's luminous
thought and exact knowledge.

You know, I daresay, that Mr. William Rathbone, then M.P. for
Liverpool, once proposed to your father to be the companion of my
first Indian journey in 1874-5, he, William Rathbone, paying all your
father's expenses. (Of this, Dr. Tyndall wrote to Mrs. Huxley:--"I
want to tell you a pleasant conversation I had last night with
Jodrell. He and a couple more want to send Hal with Grant Duff to
India, taking charge of his duties here and of all necessities ghostly
and bodily there!") Mr. Rathbone made this proposal when he found that
Lubbock, with whom I travelled a great deal at that period of my life,
was unable to go with me to India. How I wish your father had said
"Yes." My journey, as it was, turned out most instructive and
delightful; but to have lived five months with a man of his
extraordinary gifts would have been indeed a rare piece of good
fortune, and I should have been able also to have contributed to the
work upon which you are engaged a great many facts which would have
been of interest to your readers. You will, however, I am sure, take
the will for the deed, and believe me, very sincerely yours,

M.E. Grant Duff.]


CHAPTER 2.2.

1871.

["In 1871" (to quote Sir M. Foster), "the post of Secretary to the
Royal Society became vacant through the resignation of William
Sharpey, and the Fellows learned with glad surprise that Huxley, whom
they looked to rather as a not distant President, was willing to
undertake the duties of the office." This office, which he held until
1880, involved him for the next ten years in a quantity of anxious
work, not only in the way of correspondence and administration, but
the seeing through the press and often revising every biological paper
that the Society received, as well as reading those it rejected. Then,
too, he had to attend every general, council, and committee meeting,
amongst which latter the "Challenger" Committee was a load in itself.
Under pressure of all this work, he was compelled to give up active
connection with other learned societies. (See Appendix 2.)

Other work this year, in addition to the School Board, included
courses of lectures at the London Institution in January and February,
on "First Principles of Biology," and from October to December on
"Elementary Physiology"; lectures to Working Men in London from
February to April, as well as one at Liverpool, March 25, on "The
Geographical Distribution of Animals"; two lectures at the Royal
Institution, May 12 and 19, on "Berkeley on Vision," and the
"Metaphysics of Sensation" ("Collected Essays" 6). He published one
paleontological paper, "Fossil Vertebrates from the Yarrow Colliery"
(Huxley and Wright, "Irish Academy Transactions"). In June and July he
gave 36 lectures to schoolmasters--that important business of teaching
the teachers that they might set about scientific instruction in the
right way. (See below.) He attended the British Association at
Edinburgh, and laid down his Presidency; he brought out his "Manual of
Vertebrate Anatomy," and wrote a review of "Mr. Darwin's Critics" (see
below), while on October 9 he delivered an address at the Midland
Institute, Birmingham, on "Administrative Nihilism" ("Collected
Essays" 1). This address, written between September 21 and 28, and
remodelled later, was a pendant to his educational campaign on the
School Board; a restatement and justification of what he had said and
done there. His text was the various objections raised to State
interference with education; he dealt first with the upholders of a
kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves
and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on
semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise--neatly
satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in
support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to
help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent
of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new
phrase his warning] "that every man of high natural ability, who is
both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a
rocket without a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match
that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder
hollow: and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is
wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run
amuck among friends and foes."

[Another class of objectors will have it that government should be
restricted to police functions, both domestic and foreign, that any
further interference must do harm.]

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that we accept the
proposition that the functions of the State may be properly summed up
in the one great negative commandment--"Thou shalt not allow any man
to interfere with the liberty of any other man,"--I am unable to see
that the logical consequence is any such restriction of the power of
Government, as its supporters imply. If my next-door neighbour chooses
to have his drains in such a state as to create a poisonous
atmosphere, which I breathe at the risk of typhoid and diphtheria, he
restricts my just freedom to just as much as if he went about with a
pistol threatening my life; if he is to be allowed to let his children
go unvaccinated, he might as well be allowed to leave strychnine
lozenges about in the way of mine; and if he brings them up untaught
and untrained to earn their living, he is doing his best to restrict
my freedom, by increasing the burden of taxation for the support of
gaols and workhouses, which I have to pay.

The higher the state of civilisation, the more completely do the
actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and
the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without
interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his
fellow-citizens. So that, even upon the narrowest view of the
functions of the State, it must be admitted to have wider powers than
the advocates of the police theory are disposed to admit.

[This leads to a criticism of Mr. Spencer's elaborate comparison of
the body politic to the body physical, a comparison vitiated by the
fact that "among the higher physiological organisms there is none
which is developed by the conjunction of a number of primitively
independent existences into a complete whole."]

The process of social organisation appears to be comparable, not so
much to the process of organic development, as to the synthesis of the
chemist, by which independent elements are gradually built up into
complex aggregations--in which each element retains an independent
individuality, though held in subordination to the whole.

[It is permissible to quote a few more sentences from this address for
the sake of their freshness, or as illustrating the writer's ideas.

Discussing toleration,] "I cannot discover that Locke fathers the pet
doctrine of modern Liberalism, that the toleration of error is a good
thing in itself, and to be reckoned among the cardinal virtues."
[(This bears on his speech against Ultramontanism.)

Of Mr. Spencer's comparison of the State to a living body in the
interests of individualism:--]

I suppose it is universally agreed that it would be useless and absurd
for the State to attempt to promote friendship and sympathy between
man and man directly. But I see no reason why, if it be otherwise
expedient, the State may not do something towards that end indirectly.
For example, I can conceive the existence of an Established Church
which should be a blessing to the community. A Church in which, week
by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract
propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an
ideal of true, just, and pure living; a place in which those who are
weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the
contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though
attained by so few; a place in which the man of strife and of business
should have time to think how small, after all, are the rewards he
covets compared with peace and charity. Depend upon it, if such a
Church existed, no one would seek to disestablish it.

The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a
philosopher, is the rank which he holds in the estimation of his
fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters.
Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves when the one accepted an idle
knighthood, and the other became a baron of the empire. The great men
who went to their graves as Michael Faraday and George Grote seem to
me to have understood the dignity of knowledge better when they
declined all such meretricious trappings. [(On the other hand, he
thought it right and proper for officials, in scientific as in other
departments, to accept such honours, as giving them official power and
status. In his own case, while refusing all simple titular honours, he
accepted the Privy Councillorship, because, though incidentally
carrying a title, it was an office; and an office in virtue of which a
man of science might, in theory at least, be called upon to act as
responsible adviser to the Government, should special occasion arise.)

The usual note of high pressure recurs in the following letter,
written to thank Darwin for his new work, "The Descent of Man, and
Selection in relation to Sex."]

Jermyn Street, February 20, 1871.

My dear Darwin,

Best thanks for your new book, a copy of which I find awaiting me this
morning. But I wish you would not bring your books out when I am so
busy with all sorts of things. You know I can't show my face anywhere
in society without having read them--and I consider it too bad.

No doubt, too, it is full of suggestions just like that I have hit
upon by chance at page 212 of volume 1, which connects the periodicity
of vital phenomena with antecedent conditions.

Fancy lunacy, etc., coming out of the primary fact that one's nth
ancestor lived between tide-marks! I declare it's the grandest
suggestion I have heard of for an age.

I have been working like a horse for the last fortnight, with the fag
end of influenza hanging about me--and I am improving under the
process, which shows what a good tonic work is.

I shall try if I can't pick out from "Sexual Selection" some practical
hint for the improvement of gutter-babies, and bring in a resolution
thereupon at the School Board.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[This year also saw the inception of a scheme for a series of science
primers, under the joint editorship of Professors Huxley, Roscoe, and
Balfour Stewart. Huxley undertook the Introductory Primer, but it
progressed slowly owing to pressure of other work, and was not
actually finished till 1880.]

26 Abbey Place, June 29, 1871.

My dear Roscoe,

If you could see the minutes of the Proceedings of the Aid to Science
Commission, the Contagious Diseases Commission and the School Board
(to say nothing of a lecture to Schoolmasters every morning), you
would forgive me for not having written to you before.

But now that I have had a little time to look at it, I hasten to say
that your chemical primer appears to me to be admirable--just what is
wanted.

I enclose the sketch for my Primer primus. You will see the bearing of
it, rough as it is. When it touches upon chemical matters, it would
deal with them in a more rudimentary fashion than yours does, and only
prepare the minds of the fledglings for you.

I send you a copy of the Report of the Education Committee, the
resolutions based on which I am now slowly getting passed by our
Board. The adoption of (c) among the essential subjects has, I hope,
secured the future of Elementary Science in London. Cannot you get as
much done in Manchester?

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Sir Charles Lyell was now nearly 74 years old, and though he lived
four years longer, age was beginning to tell even upon his vigorous
powers. A chance meeting with him elicited the following letter:--]

26 Abbey Place, July 30, 1871.

My dear Darwin,

I met Lyell in Waterloo Place to-day walking with Carrick Moore--and
although what you said the other day had prepared me, I was greatly
shocked at his appearance, and still more at his speech. There is no
doubt it is affected in the way you describe, and the fact gives me
very sad forebodings about him. The Fates send me a swift and speedy
end whenever my time comes. I think there is nothing so lamentable as
the spectacle of the wreck of a once clear and vigorous mind!

I am glad Frank enjoyed his visit to us. He is a great favourite here,
and I hope he will understand that he is free of the house. It was the
greatest fun to see Jess and Mady [aged 13 and 12 respectively] on
their dignity with him. No more kissing, I can tell you. Miss Mady was
especially sublime.

Six out of our seven children have the whooping-cough. Need I say
therefore that the wife is enjoying herself?

With best regards to Mrs. Darwin and your daughter (and affectionate
love to Polly) believe me,

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The purchase of the microscope, already referred to, was the subject
of another letter to Dr. Dohrn, of which only the concluding paragraph
about the School Board, is of general interest. Unfortunately the
English microscope did not turn out a success, as compared to the work
of the Jena opticians: this is the "optical Sadowa" of the second
letter.]

I fancy from what you wrote to my wife that there has been some report
of my doings about the School Board in Germany. So I send you the
number of the "Contemporary Review" [Containing his article on "The
School Boards," etc.] for December that you may see what line I have
really taken. Fanatics on both sides abuse me, so I think I must be
right.

When is this infernal war to come to an end? I hold for Germany as
always, but I wish she would make peace.

With best wishes for the New Year,

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, July 7, 1871.

My dear Dohrn,

I have received your packet, and I will take care that your Report is
duly presented to the Association. But the "Happy Family" in general,
and myself in particular, are very sorry you cannot come to Scotland.
We had begun to count upon it, and the children are immeasurably
disgusted with the Insects which will not lay their eggs at the right
time.

You have become acclimatised to my bad behaviour in the matter of
correspondence, so I shall not apologise for being in arrear. I have
been frightfully hard-worked with two Royal Commissions and the School
Board all sitting at once, but I am none the worse, and things are
getting into shape--which is a satisfaction for one's trouble. I look
forward hopefully towards getting back to my ordinary work next year.

Your penultimate letter was very interesting to me, but the glimpses
into your new views which it affords are very tantalising--and I want
more. What you say about the development of the Amnion in your last
letter still more nearly brought "Donner und Blitz!" to my lips--and I
shall look out anxiously for your new facts. Lankester tells me you
have been giving lectures on your views. I wish I had been there to
hear.

He is helping me as Demonstrator in a course of instruction in Biology
which I am giving to Schoolmasters--with the view of converting them
into scientific missionaries to convert the Christian Heathen of these
islands to the true faith.

I am afraid that the English microscope turned out to be by no means
worth the money and trouble you bestowed upon it. But the glory of
such an optical Sadowa should count for something! I wish that you
would get your Jena man to supply me with one of his best objectives
if the price is not ruinous--I should like to compare it with my 1/12
inch of Ross. [In this connection it may be noted that he himself
invented a combination microscope for laboratory use, still made by
Crouch the optician. (See "Journal of Queckett Micr. Club" volume 5
page 144.)]

All our children but Jessie have the whooping-cough--Pertussis--I
don't know your German name for it. It is distressing enough for them,
but, I think, still worse for their mother. However, there are no
serious symptoms, and I hope the change of air will set them right.

They all join with me in best wishes and regrets that you are not
coming. Won't you change your mind? We start on July 31st.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The summer holiday of 1871 was spent at St. Andrews, a place rather
laborious of approach at that time, with all the impedimenta of a
large and young family, but chosen on account of its nearness to
Edinburgh, where the British Association met that year. I well
remember the night journey of some ten or eleven hours, the freshness
of the early morning at Edinburgh, the hasty excursion with my father
up the hill from the station as far as the old High Street. The return
journey, however, was made easier by the kindness of Dr. Matthews
Duncan, who put up the whole family for a night, so as to break the
journey.

We stayed at Castlemount, now belonging to Miss Paton, just opposite
the ruined castle. Among other visitors to St. Andrews known to my
father were Professors Tait and Crum Brown, who inveigled him into
making trial of the "Royal and Ancient" game, which then, as now, was
the staple resource of the famous little city. I have a vivid
recollection of his being hopelessly bunkered three or four holes from
home, and can testify that he bore the moral strain with more than
usual calm as compared with the generality of golfers. Indeed, despite
his naturally quick temper and his four years of naval service at a
time when, perhaps, the traditions of a former generation had not
wholly died out, he had a special aversion to the use of expletives;
and the occasional appearance of a strong word in his letters must be
put down to a simply literary use which he would have studiously
avoided in conversation. A curious physical result followed the vigour
with which he threw himself into the unwonted recreation. For the last
twenty years his only physical exercise had been walking, and now his
arms went black and blue under the muscular strain, as if they had
been bruised.

But the holiday was by no means spent entirely in recreation. One week
was devoted to the British Association; another to the examination of
some interesting fossils at Elgin; while the last three weeks were
occupied in writing two long articles, "Mr. Darwin's Critics," and the
address entitled "Administrative Nihilism" referred to above, as well
as a review of Dana's "Crinoids." The former, which appeared in the
"Contemporary Review" for November ("Collected Essays" 2 120-187) was
a review of (1) "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," by
A.R. Wallace, (2) "The Genesis of Species," by St. George Mivart,
F.R.S., and (3) an article in the "Quarterly" for July 1871, on
Darwin's "Descent of Man."]

"I am Darwin's bull-dog," [he once said, and the "Quarterly
Reviewer's" treatment of Darwin,] "alike unjust and unbecoming,"
[provoked him into immediate action.] "I am about sending you," [he
writes to Haeckel on November 2,] "a little review of some of Darwin's
critics. The dogs have been barking at his heels too much of late."
[Apart from this stricture, however, he notes the] "happy change"
[which] "has come over Mr. Darwin's critics. The mixture of ignorance
and insolence which at first characterised a large proportion of the
attacks with which he was assailed, is no longer the sad distinction
of anti-Darwinian criticism." [Notes too] "that, in a dozen years, the
'Origin of Species' has worked as complete a revolution in biological
science as the 'Principia' did in astronomy--and it has done so,
because, in the words of Helmholtz, it contains 'an essentially new
creative thought.'"

[The essay is particularly interesting as giving evidence of his skill
and knowledge in dealing with psychology, as against the "Quarterly
Reviewer," and even with such an unlikely subject as scholastic
metaphysics, so that, by an odd turn of events, he appeared in the
novel character of a defender of Catholic orthodoxy against an attempt
from within that Church to prove that its teachings have in reality
always been in harmony with the requirements of modern science. For
Mr. Mivart, while twitting the generality of men of science with their
ignorance of the real doctrines of his church, gave a reference to the
Jesuit theologian Suarez, the latest great representative of
scholasticism, as following St. Augustine in asserting, not direct,
but derivative creation, that is to say, evolution from primordial
matter endued with certain powers. Startled by this statement, Huxley
investigated the works of the learned Jesuit, and found not only that
Mr. Mivart's reference to the Metaphysical Disputations was not to the
point, but that in the "Tractatus de opere sex Dierum," Suarez
expressly and emphatically rejects this doctrine and reprehends
Augustine for asserting it.]

By great good luck [he writes to Darwin from St. Andrews] there is an
excellent library here, with a good copy of Suarez, in a dozen big
folios. Among these I dived, to the great astonishment of the
librarian, and looking into them as "the careful robin eyes the
delver's toil" (vide "Idylls"), I carried off the two venerable
clasped volumes which were most promising.

So I have come out in the new character of a defender of Catholic
orthodoxy, and upset Mivart out of the mouth of his own prophet.

[Darwin himself was more than pleased with the article, and wrote
enthusiastically (see "Life and Letters" 3 148-150). A few of his
generous words may be quoted to show the rate at which he valued his
friend's championship.

What a wonderful man you are to grapple with those old
metaphysical-divinity books...The pendulum is now swinging against our
side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no
mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the
right direction, as you did at the first commencement.

And again, after "mounting climax on climax," he continues:--"I must
tell you what Hooker said to me a few years ago. 'When I read Huxley,
I feel quite infantile in intellect.'"

This sketch of what constituted his holiday--and it was not very much
busier than many another holiday--may possibly suggest what his busy
time must have been like.

Till the end of the year the immense amount of work did not apparently
tell upon him. He rejoiced in it. In December he remarked to his wife
that with all his different irons in the fire, he had never felt his
mind clearer or his vigour greater. Within a week he broke down quite
suddenly, and could neither work nor think. He refers to this in the
following letter:--]

Jermyn Street, December 22, 1871.

My dear Johnny,

You are certainly improving. As a practitioner in the use of cold
steel myself, I have read your letter in to-day's "Nature," "mit
Ehrfurcht und Bewunderung." And the best evidence of the greatness of
your achievement is that it extracts this expression of admiration
from a poor devil whose brains and body are in a colloid state, and
who is off to Brighton for a day or two this afternoon.

God be with thee, my son, and strengthen the contents of thy
gall-bladder!

Ever thine,

T.H. Huxley.

PS.--Seriously, I am glad that at last a protest has been raised
against the process of anonymous self-praise to which our friend is
given. I spoke to Smith the other day about that dose of it in the
"Quarterly" article on Spirit-rapping.


CHAPTER 2.3.

1872.

[Dyspepsia, that most distressing of maladies, had laid firm hold upon
him. He was compelled to take entire rest for a time. But his first
holiday produced no lasting effect, and in the summer he was again
very ill. Then the worry of a troublesome lawsuit in connection with
the building of his new house intensified both bodily illness and
mental depression. He had great fears of being saddled with heavy
costs at the moment when he was least capable of meeting any new
expense--hardly able even to afford another much-needed spell of rest.
But in his case, as in others, at this critical moment the circle of
fellow-workers in science to whom he was bound by ties of friendship,
resolved that he should at least not lack the means of recovery. In
their name Charles Darwin wrote him the following letter, of which it
is difficult to say whether it does more honour to him who sent it or
to him who received it:--

Down, Beckenham, Kent, April 23, 1873.

My dear Huxley,

I have been asked by some of your friends (eighteen in number) to
inform you that they have placed through Robarts, Lubbock & Company,
the sum of 2100 pounds sterling to your account at your bankers. We
have done this to enable you to get such complete rest as you may
require for the re-establishment of your health; and in doing this we
are convinced that we act for the public interest, as well as in
accordance with our most earnest desires. Let me assure you that we
are all your warm personal friends, and that there is not a stranger
or mere acquaintance amongst us. If you could have heard what was
said, or could have read what was, as I believe, our inmost thoughts,
you would know that we all feel towards you, as we should to an
honoured and much loved brother. I am sure that you will return this
feeling, and will therefore be glad to give us the opportunity of
aiding you in some degree, as this will be a happiness to us to the
last day of our lives. Let me add that our plan occurred to several of
your friends at nearly the same time and quite independently of one
another.

My dear Huxley, your affectionate friend,

Charles Darwin.

It was a poignant moment.] "What have I done to deserve this?" [he
exclaimed. The relief from anxiety, so generously proffered, entirely
overcame him; and for the first time, he allowed himself to confess
that in the long struggle against ill-health, he had been beaten; but,
as he said, only enough to teach him humility.

His first trip in search of health was in 1872, when he obtained two
months' leave of absence, and prepared to go to the Mediterranean. His
lectures to women on Physiology at South Kensington were taken over by
Dr. Michael Foster, who had already acted as his substitute in the
Fullerian course of 1868. But even on this cruise after health he was
not altogether free from business. The stores of biscuit at Gibraltar
and Malta were infested with a small grub and its cocoons. Complaints
to the home authorities were met by the answer that the stores were
prepared from the purest materials and sent out perfectly free from
the pest. Discontent among the men was growing serious, when he was
requested by the Admiralty to investigate the nature of the grub and
the best means of preventing its ravages. In the end he found that the
biscuits were packed within range of stocks of newly arrived,
unpurified cocoa, from which the eggs were blown into the stores while
being packed, and there hatched out. Thereafter the packing was done
in another place and the complaints ceased.]

January 3, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

It is true enough that I am somewhat "erkrankt," though beyond general
weariness, incapacity and disgust with things in general, I do not
precisely know what is the matter with me.

Unwillingly, I begin to suspect that I overworked myself last year.
Doctors talk seriously to me, and declare that all sorts of wonderful
things will happen if I do not take some more efficient rest than I
have had for a long time. My wife adds her quota of persuasion and
admonition, until I really begin to think I must do something, if only
to have peace.

What if I were to come and look you up in Naples, somewhere in
February, as soon as my lectures are over?

The "one-plate system" might cure me of my incessant dyspeptic nausea.
A detestable grub--larva of Ephestia elatella--has been devouring Her
Majesty's stores of biscuits at Gibraltar. I have had to look into his
origin, history, and best way of circumventing him--and maybe I shall
visit Gibraltar and perhaps Malta. In that case, you will see me turn
up some of these days at the Palazzo Torlonia.

Herbert Spencer has written a friendly attack on "Administrative
Nihilism," which I will send you; in the same number of the
"Fortnightly" there is an absurd epicene splutter on the same subject
by Mill's step-daughter, Miss Helen Taylor. I intended to publish the
paper separately, with a note about Spencer's criticism, but I have
had no energy nor faculty to do anything lately.

Tell Lankester, with best regards, that I believe the teaching of
teachers in 1872 is arranged, and that I shall look for his help in
due course.

The "Happy family" have had the measles since you saw them, but they
are well again.

I write in Jermyn Street, so they cannot send messages; otherwise
there would be a chorus from them and the wife of good wishes and kind
remembrances.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[He left Southampton on January 11, in the "Malta." On the 16th, he
notes in his diary,] "I was up just in time see the great portal of
the Mediterranean well. It was a lovely morning, and nothing could be
grander than Ape Hill on one side and the Rock on the other, looking
like great lions or sphinxes on each side of a gateway."

[The morning after his arrival he breakfasted with Admiral Hornby, who
sent him over to Tangier in the "Helicon," giving the Bishop of
Gibraltar a passage at the same time. This led him to note down,] "How
the naval men love Baxter and all his works." [A letter from Dr.
Hooker to Sir John Hay ensured him a most hospitable welcome, though
continual rain spoiled his excursions. On the 21st he returned to
Gibraltar, leaving three days later in the "Nyanza" for Alexandria,
which was reached on February 1. At that "muddy hole" he landed in
pouring rain, and it was not till he reached Cairo the following day
that he at last got into his longed-for sunshine.

Seeing that three of his eight weeks had been spent in merely getting
to sunshine, his wife and doctor conspired to apply for a third month
of leave, which was immediately granted, so that he was able to accept
the invitation of two friends to go with them up the Nile as far as
Assouan in that most restful of conveyances, a dahabieh.

Cairo more than answered his expectations. He stayed here till the
13th, making several excursions in company with Sir W. Gregory,
notably to Boulak Museum, where he particularly notes the "man with
ape" from Memphis; and, of course, the pyramids, of which he remarks
that Cephren's is cased at the top with limestone, not granite. His
notebook and sketch-book show that he was equally interested in
archeology, in the landscape and scenes of everyday life, and in the
peculiar geographical and geological features of the country. His
first impression of the Delta was its resemblance to Belgium and
Lincolnshire. He has sections and descriptions of the Mokatta hill,
and the windmill mound, with a general panorama of the surrounding
country and an explanation of it. He remarks at Memphis how the
unburnt brick of which the mounds are made up had in many places
become remanie into a stratified deposit--distinguishable from Nile
mud chiefly by the pottery fragments--and notes the bearing of this
fact on the Cairo mounds. It is the same on his trip up the Nile; he
jots down the geology whenever opportunity offered; remarks, as
indication of the former height of the river, a high mud-bank beyond
Edfou, and near Assouan a pot-hole in the granite fifty feet above the
present level. Here is a detailed description of the tomb of Aahmes;
there a river-scene beside the pyramid of Meidum; or vivid sketches of
vulture and jackal at a meal in the desert, the jackal in possession
of the carcass, the vulture impatiently waiting his good pleasure for
the last scraps; of the natives working at the endless shadoofs; of a
group of listeners around a professional story-teller--unfinished, for
he was observed sketching them.

Egypt left a profound impression upon him. His artistic delight in it
apart, the antiquities and geology of the country were a vivid
illustration to his trained eye of the history of man and the
influence upon him of the surrounding country, the link between
geography and history.

He left behind him for a while a most unexpected memorial of his
visit. A friend not long after going to the pyramids, was delighted to
find himself thus adjured by a donkey-boy, who tried to cut out his
rival with "Not him donkey, sah; him donkey bad, sah; my donkey good;
my donkey 'Fessor-uxley donkey, sah." It appears that the Cairo
donkey-boys have a way of naming their animals after celebrities whom
they have borne on their backs.

While at Thebes, on his way down the river again, he received news of
the death of the second son of Matthew Arnold, to whom he wrote the
following letter:--]

Thebes, March 10, 1872.

My dear Arnold,

I cannot tell you how shocked I was to see in the papers we received
yesterday the announcement of the terrible blow which has fallen upon
Mrs. Arnold and yourself.

Your poor boy looked such a fine manly fellow the last time I saw him,
when we dined at your house, that I had to read the paragraph over and
over again before I could bring myself to believe what I read. And it
is such a grievous opening of a wound hardly yet healed that I hardly
dare to think of the grief which must have bowed down Mrs. Arnold and
yourself.

I hardly know whether I do well in writing to you. If such trouble
befell me there are very few people in the world from whom I could
bear even sympathy--but you would be one of them, and therefore I hope
that you will forgive a condolence which will reach you so late as to
disturb rather than soothe, for the sake of the hearty affection which
dictates it.

My wife has told me of the very kind letter you wrote her. I was
thoroughly broken down when I left England, and did not get much
better until I fell into the utter and absolute laziness of dahabieh
life. A month of that has completely set me up. I am as well as ever;
and though very grateful to Old Nile for all that he has done for
me--not least for a whole universe of new thoughts and pictures of
life--I begin to feel strongly

    'the need of a world of men for me.'

But I am not going to overwork myself again. Pray make my kindest
remembrances to Mrs. Arnold, and believe me, always yours very
faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Leaving Assouan on March 3, and Cairo on the 18th, he returned by way
of Messina to Naples, taking a day at Catania to look at Etna. At
Naples he found his friend Dohrn was absent, and his place as host was
filled by his father. Vesuvius was ascended, Pozzuoli and Pompeii
visited, and two days spent in Rome.]

Hotel de Grande Bretagne, Naples, March 31, 1872.

My dear Tyndall,

Your very welcome letter did not reach me until the 18th of March,
when I returned to Cairo from my expedition to Assouan. Like Johnny
Gilpin, I "little thought when I set out, of running such a rig"; but
while at Cairo I fell in with Ossory of the Athenaeum, and a very
pleasant fellow, Charles Ellis, who had taken a dahabieh, and were
about to start up the Nile. They invited me to take possession of a
vacant third cabin, and I accepted their hospitality, with the
intention of going as far as Thebes and returning on my own hook. But
when we got to Thebes I found there was no getting away again without
much more exposure and fatigue than I felt justified in facing just
then, and as my friends showed no disposition to be rid of me, I stuck
to the boat, and only left them on the return voyage at Rodu, which is
the terminus of the railway, about 150 miles from Cairo.

We had an unusually quick journey, as I was little more than a month
away from Cairo, and as my companions made themselves very agreeable,
it was very pleasant. I was not particularly well at first, but by
degrees the utter rest of this "always afternoon" sort of life did its
work, and I am as well and vigorous now as ever I was in my life.

I should have been home within a fortnight of the time I had
originally fixed. This would have been ample time to have enabled me
to fulfil all the engagements I had made before starting; and Donnelly
had given me to understand that "My Lords" would not trouble their
heads about my stretching my official leave. Nevertheless I was very
glad to find the official extension (which was the effect of my wife's
and your and Bence Jones's friendly conspiracy) awaiting me at Cairo.
A rapid journey home via Brindisi might have rattled my brains back
into the colloid state in which they were when I left England. Looking
back through the past six months I begin to see that I have had a
narrow escape from a bad breakdown, and I am full of good resolutions.

As the first-fruit of these you see that I have given up the School
Board, and I mean to keep clear of all that semi-political work
hereafter. I see that Sandon (whom I met at Alexandria) and Miller
have followed my example, and that Lord Lawrence is likely to go. What
a skedaddle!

It seems very hard to escape, however. Since my arrival here, on
taking up the "Times" I saw a paragraph about the Lord Rectorship of
St. Andrews. After enumerating a lot of candidates for that honour,
the paragraph concluded, "But we understand that at present Professor
Huxley has the best chance." It is really too bad if any one has been
making use of my name without my permission. But I don't know what to
do about it. I had half a mind to write to Tulloch to tell him that I
can't and won't take any such office, but I should look rather foolish
if he replied that it was a mere newspaper report, and that nobody
intended to put me up.

Egypt interested me profoundly, but I must reserve the tale of all I
did and saw there for word of mouth. From Alexandria I went to
Messina, and thence made an excursion along the lovely Sicilian coast
to Catania and Etna. The old giant was half covered with snow, and
this fact, which would have tempted you to go to the top, stopped me.
But I went to the Val del Bove, whence all the great lava streams have
flowed for the last two centuries, and feasted my eyes with its rugged
grandeur. From Messina I came on here, and had the great good fortune
to find Vesuvius in eruption. Before this fact the vision of good
Bence Jones forbidding much exertion vanished into thin air, and on
Thursday up I went in company with Ray Lankester and my friend Dohrn's
father, Dohrn himself being unluckily away. We had a glorious day, and
did not descend till late at night. The great crater was not very
active, and contented itself with throwing out great clouds of steam
and volleys of red-hot stones now and then. These were thrown towards
the south-west side of the cone, so that it was practicable to walk
all round the northern and eastern lip, and look down into the Hell
Gate. I wished you were there to enjoy the sight as much as I did. No
lava was issuing from the great crater, but on the north side of this,
a little way below the top, an independent cone had established itself
as the most charming little pocket-volcano imaginable. It could not
have been more than 100 feet high, and at the top was a crater not
more than six or seven feet across. Out of this, with a noise exactly
resembling a blast furnace and a slowly-working high pressure steam
engine combined, issued a violent torrent of steam and fragments of
semi-fluid lava as big as one's fist, and sometimes bigger. These shot
up sometimes as much as 100 feet, and then fell down on the sides of
the little crater, which could be approached within fifty feet without
any danger. As darkness set in, the spectacle was most strange. The
fiery stream found a lurid reflection in the slowly-drifting steam
cloud, which overhung it, while the red-hot stones which shot through
the cloud shone strangely beside the quiet stars in a moonless sky.

Not from the top of this cinder cone, but from its side, a couple of
hundred feet down, a stream of lava issued. At first it was not more
than a couple of feet wide, but whether from receiving accessions or
merely from the different form of slope, it got wider on its journey
down to the Atrio del Cavallo, a thousand feet below. The slope
immediately below the exit must have been near fifty, but the lava did
not flow quicker than very thick treacle would do under like
circumstances. And there were plenty of freshly cooled lava streams
about, inclined at angles far greater than those which that learned
Academician, Elie de Beaumont, declared to be possible. Naturally I
was ashamed of these impertinent lava currents, and felt inclined to
call them "Laves mousseuses." [Elie de Beaumont "is said to have
'damned himself to everlasting fame' by inventing the nickname of 'la
science moussante' for Evolutionism." See "Life of Darwin" 2 185.]

Courage, my friend, behold land! I know you love my handwriting. I am
off to Rome to-day, and this day-week, if all goes well, I shall be
under my own roof-tree again. In fact I hope to reach London on
Saturday evening. It will be jolly to see your face again.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

My best remembrances to Hirst if you see him before I do.

[My father reached home on April 6, sunburnt and bearded almost beyond
recognition, but not really well, for as soon as he began work again
in London, his old enemy returned. Early hours, the avoidance of
society and societies, an hour's riding before starting at nine for
South Kensington, were all useless; the whole year was poisoned until
a special diet prescribed by Dr. (afterwards sir) Andrew Clark,
followed by another trip abroad, effected a cure. I remember his
saying once that he learned by sad experience that such a holiday as
that in Egypt was no good for him. What he really required was
mountain air and plenty of exercise. The following letters fill up the
outline of this period:--]

26 Abbey Place, May 20, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

I suppose that you are now back in Naples, perambulating the Chiaja,
and looking ruefully on the accumulation of ashes on the foundations
of the aquarium! The papers, at any rate, tell us that the ashes of
Vesuvius have fallen abundantly at Naples. Moreover, that abominable
municipality is sure to have made the eruption an excuse for all sorts
of delays. May the gods give you an extra share of temper and
patience!

What an unlucky dog our poor Ray is, to go and get fever when of all
times in the world's history he should not have had it. However, I
hear he is better and on his way home. I hope he will be well enough
when he returns not only to get his Fellowship, but to help me in my
schoolmaster work in June and July.

I was greatly disgusted to miss you in Naples, but it was something to
find your father instead. What a vigorous, genial YOUNGSTER of three
score and ten he is. I declare I felt quite aged beside him. We had a
glorious day on Vesuvius, and behaved very badly by leaving him at the
inn for I do not know how many hours, while we wandered about the
cone. But he had a very charming young lady for companion, and
possibly had the best of it. I am very sorry that at the last I went
off in a hurry without saying "Good-bye" to him, but I desired
Lankester to explain, and I am sure he will have sympathised with my
anxiety to see Rome.

I returned, thinking myself very well, but a bad fit of dyspepsia
seized me, and I found myself obliged to be very idle and very careful
of myself--neither of which things are to my taste. But I am right
again now, and hope to have no more backslidings. However, I am afraid
I may not be able to attend the Brighton meeting. In which case you
will have to pay us a visit, wherever we may be--where, we have not
yet made up our minds, but it will not be so far as St. Andrews.

Now for a piece of business. The new Governor of Ceylon is a friend of
mine, and is proposing to set up a Natural History Museum in Ceylon.
He wants a curator--some vigorous fellow with plenty of knowledge and
power of organisation who will make use of his great opportunities. He
tells me he thinks he can start him with 350 pounds sterling a year
(and a house) with possible increase to 400 pounds sterling. I do not
know any one here who would answer the purpose. Can you recommend me
any one? If you can, let me know at once, and don't take so long in
writing to me as I have been in writing to you.

I await the "Prophecies of the Holy Antonius" anxiously. [His work on
the development of the Arthropoda or Spider family.] Like the Jews of
old, I come of an unbelieving generation, and need a sign. The bread
and the oil, also the chamber in the wall shall not fail the prophet
when he comes in August: nor Donner and Blitzes either.

I leave the rest of the space for the wife.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following is in reply to a jest of Dr. Dohrn's--who was still a
bachelor--upon a friend's unusual sort of offering to a young lady.]

I suspected the love affair you speak of, and thought the young damsel
very attractive. I suppose it will come to nothing, even if he be
disposed to add his hand to the iron and quinine, in the next present
he offers...and, oh my Diogenes, happy in a tub of arthropodous
Entwickelungsgeschichte [History of Development.], despise not
beefsteaks, nor wives either. They also are good.

Jermyn Street, June 5, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

I have written to the Governor of Ceylon, and enclosed the first half
of your letter to me to him as he understands High Dutch. I have told
him that the best thing he can do is to write to you at Naples and
tell you he will be very happy to see you as soon as you can come. And
that if you do come you will give him the best possible advice about
his museum, and let him have no rest until he has given you a site for
a zoological station.

I have no doubt you will get a letter from him in three weeks or so.
His name is Gregory, and you will find him a good-humoured acute man
of the world, with a very great general interest in scientific and
artistic matters. Indeed in art I believe he is a considerable
connoisseur.

I am very grieved to hear of your father's serious illness. At his age
cerebral attacks are serious, and when we spent so many pleasant hours
together at Naples, he seemed to have an endless store of vigour--very
much like his son Anton.

What put it into your head that I had any doubt of your power of work?
I am ready to believe that you are Hydra in the matter of heads and
Briareus in the matter of hands.

...If you go to Ceylon I shall expect you to come back by way of
England. It's the shortest route anywhere from India, though it may
not look so on the map.

How am I? Oh, getting along and just keeping the devil of dyspepsia at
arm's length. The wife and other members of the H.F. are well, and
would send you greetings if they knew I was writing to you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A little later Von Willemoes Suhm] ("why the deuce does he have such
a long name, instead of a handy monosyllable are dissyllable like
Dohrn or Huxley?") [was recommended for the post. He afterwards was
one of the scientific staff of the "Challenger," and died during the
voyage.]

Morthoe, near Barnstaple, North Devon, August 5, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

I trust you have not been very wroth with me for my long delay in
answering your last letter. For the last six weeks I have been very
busy lecturing daily to a batch of schoolmasters, and looking after
their practical instruction in the laboratory which the Government
has, at last, given me. In the "intervals of business" I have been
taking my share in a battle which has been raging between my friend
Hooker of Kew and his official chief...and moreover I have just had
strength enough to get my daily work done and no more, and everything
that could be put off has gone to the wall. Three days ago, the "Happy
Family," bag and baggage, came to this remote corner, where I propose
to take a couple of months' entire rest--and put myself in order for
next winter's campaign. It is a little village five miles from the
nearest town (which is Ilfracombe), and our house is at the head of a
ravine running down to the sea. Our backs are turned to England and
our faces to America with no land that I know of between. The country
about is beautiful, and if you will come we will put you up at the
little inn, and show you something better than even Swanage. There are
slight difficulties about the commissariat, but that is the Hausfrau's
business, and not mine. At the worst, bread, eggs, milk, and rabbits
are certain, and the post from London takes two days!

Morthoe, Ilfracombe, North Devon, August 23, 1872.

My dear Whirlwind,

I promise you all my books, past, present, and to come for the
Aquarium. The best part about them is that they will not take up much
room. Ask for Owen's by all means; "Fas est etiam ab hoste doceri." I
am very glad you have got the British Association publications, as it
will be a good precedent for the Royal Society.

Have you talked to Hooker about marine botany? He may be able to help
you as soon as X. the accursed (may jackasses sit upon his
grandmother's grave, as we say in the East) leaves him alone.

It is hateful that you should be in England without seeing us, and for
the first time I lament coming here. The children howled in chorus
when they heard that you could not come. At this moment the whole
tribe and their mother have gone to the sea, and I must answer your
letter before the post goes out, which it does here about half an hour
after it comes in.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[In 1872 Huxley was at length enabled to establish in his regular
classes a system of science teaching based upon laboratory work by the
students, which he had long felt to be the only true method. It
involved the verification of every fact by each student, and was a
training in scientific method even more than in scientific fact. Had
circumstances only permitted, the new epoch in biological teaching
might have been antedated by many years. But, as he says in the
preface to the "Practical Biology," 1875:--]

Practical work was forbidden by the limitations of space in the
building in Jermyn Street, which possessed no room applicable to the
purpose of a laboratory, and I was obliged to content myself, for many
years, with what seemed the next best thing, namely, as full an
exposition as I could give of the characters of certain plants and
animals, selected as types of vegetable and animal organisation, by
way of introduction to systematic zoology and paleontology.

[There was no laboratory work, but he would show an experiment or a
dissection during the lecture or perhaps for a few minutes after, when
the audience crowded round the lecture table.

The opportunity came in 1871. As he afterwards impressed upon the
great city companies in regard to technical education, the teaching of
science throughout the country turned upon the supply of trained
teachers. The part to be played by elementary science under the
Education Act of 1870, added urgency to the question of proper
teaching. With this in view, he organised a course of instruction for
those who had been preparing pupils for the examinations of the
Science and Art Department, "scientific missionaries," as he described
them to Dr. Dohrn.

In the promotion of the practical teaching of biology (writes the late
Jeffery Parker, "Natural Science" 8 49), Huxley's services can hardly
be overestimated. Botanists had always been in the habit of
distributing flowers to their students, which they could dissect or
not as they chose; animal histology was taught in many colleges under
the name of practical physiology; and at Oxford an excellent system of
zoological work had been established by the late Professor Rolleston.
("Rolleston (Professor Lankester writes to me) was the first to
systematically conduct the study of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in
this country by making use of a carefully selected series of animals.
His 'types' were the Rat, the Common Pigeon, the Frog, the Perch, the
Crayfish, Blackbeetle, Anodon, Snail, Earthworm, Leech, Tapeworm. He
had a series of dissections of these mounted, also loose dissections
and elaborate manuscript descriptions. The student went through this
series, dissecting fresh specimens for himself. After some ten years'
experience Rolleston printed his manuscript directions and notes as a
book, called 'Forms of Animal Life.'

"This all preceded the practical class at South Kensington in 1871. I
have no doubt that Rolleston was influenced in his plan by your
father's advice. But Rolleston had the earlier opportunity of putting
the method into practice.

"Your father's series of types were chosen so as to include plants,
and he gave more attention to microscopic forms and to microscopic
structure than did Rolleston."

It was distinctive of the lectures that they were on biology, on
plants as well as animals, to illustrate all the fundamental features
of living things.)

But the biological laboratory, as it is now understood, may be said to
date from about 1870, when Huxley, with the cooperation of Professors
Foster, Rutherford, Lankester, Martin, and others (T.J. Parker, G.B.
Howes, and the present Sir W. Thiselton Dyer, K.C.M.G., C.I.E.,), held
short summer classes for science teachers at South Kensington, the
daily work consisting of an hour's lecture followed by four hours'
laboratory work, in which the students verified for themselves facts
which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate
pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of the
more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One
clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the
Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under
the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture
in Huxley's 'Physiology.'"

Later, in 1872, when the biological department of the Royal School of
Mines was transferred to South Kensington, this method was adopted as
part of the regular curriculum of the school, and from that time the
teaching "of zoology by lectures alone became an anachronism."

The first of these courses to schoolmasters took place, as has been
said, in 1871. Some large rooms on the ground floor of the South
Kensington Museum were used for the purpose. There was no proper
laboratory, but professor and demonstrators rigged up everything as
wanted. Huxley was in the full tide of that more than natural energy
which preceded his breakdown in health, and gave what Professor Ray
Lankester describes as "a wonderful course of lectures," one every day
from ten to eleven for six weeks, in June and half July. The three
demonstrators (those named first on the list above) each took a third
of the class, about thirty-five apiece. "Great enthusiasm prevailed.
We went over a number of plants and of animals--including microscopic
work and some physiological experiment. The 'types' were more numerous
than in later courses."

In 1872 the new laboratory--the present one--was ready.] "I have a
laboratory," [writes Huxley to Dohrn,] "which it shall do your eyes
good to behold when you come back from Ceylon, the short way." [(i.e.
via England.) here a similar course, under the same demonstrators,
assisted by H.N. Martin, was given in the summer, Huxley, though very
shaky in health, making a point of carrying them out himself.]

26 Abbey Place, June 4, 1872.

My dear Tyndall,

I MUST be at work on examination papers all day to-day, but to-morrow
I am good to lunch with you (and abscond from the Royal Commission,
which will get on very well without me) or to go with you and call on
your friends, whichever may be most convenient.

Many thanks for all your kind and good advice about the lectures, but
I really think they will not be too much for me, and it is of the
utmost importance I should carry them on.

They are the commencement of a new system of teaching which, if I
mistake not, will grow into a big thing and bear great fruit, and just
at this present moment (nobody is necessary very long) I am the
necessary man to carry it on. I could not get a suppleant if I would,
and you are no more the man than I am to let a pet scheme fall through
for the fear of a little risk of self. And really and truly I find
that by taking care I pull along very well. Moreover, it isn't my
brains that get wrong, but only my confounded stomach.

I have read your memorial [In the affair of Dr. Hooker already
referred to.] which is very strong and striking, but a difficulty
occurs to me about a good deal of it, and that is that it won't do to
quote Hooker's official letters before they have been called for in
Parliament, or otherwise made public. We should find ourselves in the
wrong officially, I am afraid, by doing so. However we can discuss
this when we meet. I will be at the Athenaeum at 4 o'clock.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[As for the teaching by "types," which was the most salient feature of
his method, and therefore the most easily applied and misapplied,
Professor Parker continues:--

Huxley's method of teaching was based upon the personal examination by
the student of certain "types" of animals and plants selected with a
view of illustrating the various groups. But, in his lectures, these
types were not treated as the isolated things they necessarily appear
in a laboratory manual or an examination syllabus; each, on the
contrary, took its proper place as an example of a particular grade of
structure, and no student of ordinary intelligence could fail to see
that the types were valuable, not for themselves, but simply as
marking, so to speak, the chapters of a connected narrative. Moreover,
in addition to the types, a good deal of work of a more general
character was done. Thus, while we owe to Huxley more than to any one
else the modern system of teaching biology, he is by no means
responsible for the somewhat arid and mechanical aspect it has assumed
in certain quarters.

The application of the same system to botanical teaching was
inaugurated in 1873, when, being compelled to go abroad for his
health, he arranged that Mr. (now Sir W.) Thiselton Dyer should take
his place and lecture on Botany.

The "Elementary Instruction in Biology," published in 1875, was a
text-book based upon this system. This book, in writing which Huxley
was assisted by his demonstrator, H.N. Martin, was reprinted thirteen
times before 1888, when it was "Revised and Extended by Howes and
Scott," his later assistants. The revised edition is marked by one
radical change, due to the insistence of his demonstrator, the late
Professor Jeffery Parker. In the first edition, the lower forms of
life were first dealt with; from simple cells--amoeba, yeast-plant,
blood-corpuscle--the student was taken through an ascending series of
plants and of animals, ending with the frog or rabbit. But] "the
experience of the Lecture-room and the Laboratory taught me," [writes
Huxley in the new preface,] "that philosophical as it might be in
theory, it had defects in practice." [The process might be regarded as
not following the scientific rule of proceeding from the known to the
unknown; while the small and simple organisms required a skill in
handling high-power microscopes which was difficult for beginners to
acquire. Hence the course was reversed, and began with the more
familiar type of the rabbit or frog. This was Rolleston's practice;
but it may be noted that Professor Ray Lankester has always maintained
and further developed "the original Huxleian plan of beginning with
the same microscopic forms" as being a most important philosophic
improvement on Rolleston's plan, and giving, he considers, "the truer
'twist,' as it were, to a student's mind."

When the book was sent to Darwin, he wrote back (November 12, 1875):--

My dear Huxley,

Many thanks for your biology, which I have read. It was a real stroke
of genius to think of such a plan. Lord, how I wish that I had gone
through such a course.

Ever yours,

Charles Darwin.

A large portion of his time and energy was occupied in the
organisation of this course of teaching for teachers, and its
elaboration before being launched on a larger scale in October, when
the Biological Department of the Jermyn Street school was transferred
to the new buildings at South Kensington, fitted with laboratories
which were to excite his friend Dr. Dohrn's envy. But he was also at
work upon his share of the "Science Primers," so far as his still
uncertain health allowed. This and the affairs of the British
Association are the subject of several letters to Sir Henry Roscoe and
Dr. Tyndall.]

26 Abbey Place, April 8, 1872.

My dear Roscoe,

Many thanks for your kind letter of welcome. My long rest has
completely restored me. As my doctor told me, I was sound, wind and
limb, and had merely worn myself out. I am not going to do that again,
and you see that I have got rid of the School Board. It was an awful
incubus!

Oddly enough I met the Ashtons in the Vatican, and heard about your
perplexities touching Oxford. I should have advised you to do as you
have done. I think that you have a great piece of work to do at Owens
College, and that you will do it. If you had gone to Oxford you would
have sacrificed all the momentum you have gained in Manchester; and
would have had to begin de novo, among conditions which, I imagine, it
is very hard for a non-University man to appreciate and adjust himself
to.

I like the look of the "Primers" (of which Macmillan has sent me
copies to-day) very much, and shall buckle to at mine as soon as
possible. I am very glad you did not wait for me. I remained in a very
shaky condition up to the middle of March, and could do nothing.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

The wife unites with me in kind regards to Mrs. Roscoe and yourself.

Morthoe, Ilfracombe, North Devon, September 9, 1872.

My dear Tyndall,

I was very glad to have news of you, and to hear that you are
vigorous.

My outing hitherto has not been very successful, so far as the inward
man is concerned at least, for the weather has been good enough. But I
have been worried to death with dyspepsia and the hyperchondriacal
bedevilments that follow in its train, until I am seriously thinking
of returning to town to see if the fine air of St. John's Wood (as the
man says in "Punch") won't enable me to recover from the effects of
the country.

I wish I were going with you to Yankee Land, not to do any lecturing,
God forbid! but to be a quiet spectator in a corner of the
enthusiastic audiences. I am as lazy as a dog, and the role of
looker-on would just suit me. However, I have a good piece of work to
do in organising my new work at South Kensington.

I have just asked my children what message they have to send to you,
and they send their love; very sorry they won't see you before you go,
and hope you won't come back speaking through your nose!

I shall be in town this week or next, and therefore shall see you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, September 17, 1872.

My dear Roscoe,

Your letter has followed me from Morthoe here. We had good enough
weather in Devon--but my stay there was marred by the continuous
dyspepsia and concurrent hyperchondriacal incapacity. At last, I could
not stand it any longer, and came home for "change of air," leaving
the wife and chicks to follow next week. By dint of living on cocoa
and Revalenta, and giving up drink, tobacco, and all other things that
make existence pleasant, I am getting better.

What was your motive in getting kicked by a horse? I stopped away from
the Association without that; and am not sorry to have been out of the
way of the X. business. What is to become of the association if -- is
to monopolise it? And then there was that scoundrel, Louis
Napoleon--to whom no honest man ought to speak--gracing the scene. I
am right glad I was out of it.

I am at my wits' end to suggest a lecturer for you. I wish I could
offer myself, but I have refused everything of that sort on the score
of health; and moreover, I am afraid of my wife!

What do you say to Ramsay? He lectures very well. I have done nothing
whatever to the Primer. Stewart sent me Geikie's letter this morning,
and I have asked Macmillan to send Geikie the proofs of my Primer so
far as they go. We must not overlap more than can be helped.

I have not seen Hooker yet since my return. While all this row has
been going on, I could not ask him to do anything for us. And until X.
is dead and d--d (officially at any rate), I am afraid there will be
little peace for him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Please remember me very kindly to Mrs. Roscoe.

[In a letter of September 25 is a reference to the way in which his
increasing family had outgrown his house in Abbey Place. Early in the
preceding year, he had come to the decision to buy a small house in
the same neighbourhood, and add to it so as to give elbow-room to each
and all of the family. This was against the advice of his friend and
legal adviser, to whom he wrote announcing his decision, as follows.
The letter was adorned with a sketch of an absurd cottage, "Ye House!"
perched like a windmill on a kind of pedestal, and with members of the
family painfully ascending a ladder to the upper story, above the
ominous legend, "Staircase forgotten."]

March 20, 1871.

My dear Burton,

There is something delightfully refreshing in rushing into a piece of
practical work in the teeth of one's legal adviser.

If the lease of a piece of ground whereon I am going to build mine
house come to you, will you see if it's all right.

Yours wilfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[This house, Number 4 Marlborough Place, stands on the north side of
that quiet street, close to its junction with Abbey Road. It is next
door to the Presbyterian Church, on the other side of which again is a
Jewish synagogue. The irregular front of the house, with the original
cottage, white-painted and deep eaved, joined by a big porch to the
new uncompromising square face of yellow brick, distinguished only by
its extremely large windows, was screened from the road by a high oak
paling, and a well-grown row of young lime-trees. Taken as a whole, it
was not without character, and certainly was unlike most London
houses. It was built for comfort, not beauty; designed, within
stringent limits as to cost, to give each member of the family room to
get away by himself or herself if so disposed. Moreover, the gain in
space made it more possible to see something of friends or put up a
guest, than in the small and crowded house in Abbey Place.

A small garden lay in front of the house; a considerably larger garden
behind, wherein the chief ornament was then a large apple-tree, that
never failed to spread a cloud of blossom for my father's birthday,
the 4th of May.

Over the way, too, for many years we were faced by a long garden full
of blossoming pear-trees in which thrushes and blackbirds sang and
nested, belonging to a desolate house in the Abbey Road, which was
tenanted by a solitary old man, supposed to be a male prototype of
Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations."

The move was accompanied by a unique and unpleasant experience. A
knavish fellow, living in a cottage close to the foot of the garden,
sought to blackmail the new comer, under threat of legal proceedings,
alleging that a catchment well for surface drainage had made his
basement damp. Unfortunately for his case, it could be shown that the
pipes had not yet been connected with the well, and when he carried
out his threat, he gained nothing from his suit in Chancery and his
subsequent appeal, except some stinging remarks from Vice-Chancellor
Malins.]

I am afraid the brute is impecunious [wrote my father after the first
suit failed], and that I shall get nothing out of him. So I shall have
had three months' worry, and be fined 100 pounds sterling or so for
being wholly and absolutely in the right.

[Happily the man turned out to have enough means to pay the bulk of
the costs; but that was no compensation for the mental worry and
consequent ill-health entailed from November to June.

The only amusing point in the whole affair was when the plaintiff's
solicitors had the face to file an affidavit before the
Vice-Chancellor himself in answer to his strictures upon the case,
"about as regular a proceeding," reports Mr. Burton, "as for a middy
to reply upon the Post Captain on his own quarter-deck."

The move was made in the third week of December (1872) amid endless
rain and mud and with workmen still in the house. It was attended by
one inconvenience. He writes to Darwin on December 20, 1872:--]

I am utterly disgusted at having only just received your note of
Tuesday. But the fact is, there is a certain inconvenience about
having FOUR addresses as has been my case for the most part of this
week, in consequence of our moving--and as I have not been to Jermyn
Street before to-day, I have missed your note. I should run round to
Queen Anne Street now on the chance of catching you, but I am bound
here by an appointment.

[One incident of the move, however, was more agreeable. Mr. Herbert
Spencer took the opportunity of sending a New Year's gift for the new
house, in the shape of a handsome clock, wishing, as he said, "to
express in some way more empathic than by words, my sense of the many
kindnesses I have received at your hands during the twenty years of
our friendship. Remembrance of the things you have done in furtherance
of my aims, and of the invaluable critical aid you have given me, with
so much patience and at so much cost of time, has often made me feel
how much I owe you."

After a generous reference to occasions when the warmth of debate
might have betrayed him into more vigorous expressions than he
intended, he concludes:--

But inadequately as I may ordinarily show it, you will (knowing that I
am tolerably candid) believe me when I say that there is no one whose
judgment on all subjects I so much respect, or whose friendship I so
highly value.

It may be remembered that the 1872 address on "Administrative
Nihilism" led to a reply from the pen of Mr. Spencer, as the champion
of Individualism. When my father sent him the volume in which this
address was printed, he wrote back a letter (September 29, 1873) which
is characterised by the same feeling. It expresses his thanks for the
book, "and many more for the kind expression of feeling in the
preface. If you had intended to set an example to the Philistines of
the way in which controversial differences may be maintained without
any decrease of sympathy, you could not have done it more perfectly."

In connection with the building of the house, Tyndall had advanced a
sum of money to his friend, and with his usual generosity, not only
received interest with the greatest reluctance, but would have liked
to make a gift of the principal. He writes, "If I remain a bachelor I
will circumvent you--if not--not. It cleaves to me like dirt--and that
is why you wish to get rid of it." To this he received answer:--

February 26, 1873.

I am not to be deterred by any amount of bribery and corruption, from
bringing you under the yoke of a "rare and radiant,"--whenever I
discover one competent to undertake the ticklish business of governing
you. I hope she will be "radiant,"--uncommonly "rare" she certainly
will be!

Two years later this loan was paid off, with the following letter:--]

4 Marlborough Place, January 11, 1875.

My dear old Shylock,

My argosies have come in, and here is all that was written in the
bond! If you want the pound of flesh too, you know it is at your
service, and my Portia won't raise that pettifogging objection to
shedding a little blood into the bargain, which that other one did.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[On October 24 Miss Jex Blake wrote to him to ask his help for herself
and the other women medical students at Edinburgh. For two years they
had only been able to get anatomical teaching in a mixed class; but
wishing to have a separate class, at least for the present, they had
tried to arrange for one that session. The late demonstrator at the
Surgeons' Hall, who had given them most of their teaching before, had
undertaken to teach this separate class, but was refused recognition
by the University Court, on the ground that they had no evidence of
his qualifications, while refusing to let him prove his qualification
by examination. This the women students understood to be an indirect
means of suppressing their aspirations; they therefore begged Huxley
to examine their instructor with a view to giving him a certificate
which should carry weight with the University Court.

He replied:--]

To Miss Jex Blake.

October 28, 1872.

Dear Madam,

While I fully sympathise with the efforts made by yourself and others,
to obtain for women the education requisite to qualify them for
medical practice, and while I think that women who have the
inclination and the capacity to follow the profession of medicine are
most unjustly dealt with if any obstacles beyond those which are
natural and inevitable are placed in their way, I must nevertheless
add, that I as completely sympathise with those Professors of Anatomy,
Physiology, and Obstetrics, who object to teach such subjects to mixed
classes of young men and women brought together without any further
evidence of moral and mental fitness for such association than the
payment of their fees.

In fact, with rare exceptions, I have refused to admit women to my own
Lectures on Comparative Anatomy for many years past. But I should not
hesitate to teach anything I know to a class composed of women; and I
find it hard to believe that any one should really wish to prevent
women from obtaining efficient separate instruction, and from being
admitted to Examination for degrees upon the same terms as men.

You will therefore understand that I should be most glad to help you
if I could--and it is with great regret that I feel myself compelled
to refuse your request to examine Mr. H--.

In the first place I am in the midst of my own teaching, and with
health not yet completely re-established I am obliged to keep clear of
all unnecessary work. Secondly, such an examination must be practical,
and I have neither dissecting-room available nor the anatomical
license required for human dissection; and thirdly, it is not likely
that the University authorities would attach much weight to my report
on one or two days' work--if the fact that Mr. H-- has already filled
the office of anatomical Demonstrator (as I understand from you) does
not satisfy them as to his competency.

I am, dear Madam, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The last event of the year was that he was elected by the students
Lord Rector of Aberdeen University--a position, the duties of which
consist partly in attending certain meetings of the University Court,
but more especially in delivering an address. This, however, was not
required for another twelvemonth, and the address on "Universities,
Actual and Ideal," was delivered in fulfilment of this duty in
February 1874.


CHAPTER 2.4.

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.


CHAPTER 2.5.

1874.

[My father's health continued fairly good in 1874, and while careful
to avoid excessive strain he was able to undertake nearly as much as
before his illness outside his regular work at South Kensington, the
Royal Society, and on the Royal Commission. To this year belong three
important essays, educational and philosophical. From February 25 to
March 3 he was at Aberdeen, staying first with Professor Bain,
afterwards with Mr. Webster, in fulfilment of his first duty as Lord
Rector to deliver an address to the students. (It may be noted that
between 1860 and 1890 he and Professor Bain were the only Lord Rectors
of Aberdeen University elected on non-political grounds.) Taking as
his subject "Universities, Actual and Ideal," he then proceeded to
vindicate, historically and philosophically, the claims of natural
science to take the place from which it had so long been ousted in the
universal culture which a University professes to give. More
especially he demanded an improved system of education in the medical
school, a point to which he gave practical effect in the Council of
the University.]

In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to
obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the
use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a
University the force of living example should fire the student with a
noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow
in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the
very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth,
that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much
learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so
much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is
greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.
[("Collected Essays" 3 189 sqq.)

As for the "so-called 'conflict of studies,'" he exclaims:--]

One might as well inquire which of the terms of a Rule of Three sum
one ought to know in order to get a trustworthy result. Practical life
is such a sum, in which your duty multiplied into your capacity and
divided by your circumstances gives you the fourth term in the
proportion, which is your deserts, with great accuracy.

[The knowledge on which medical practice should be based is] "the sort
of practical, familiar, finger-end knowledge which a watchmaker has of
a watch," [the knowledge gained in the dissecting-room and
laboratory.]

Until each of the greater truths of anatomy and physiology has become
an organic part of your minds--until you would know them if you were
roused and questioned in the middle of the night, as a man knows the
geography of his native place and the daily life of his home. That is
the sort of knowledge which, once obtained, is a lifelong possession.
Other occupations may fill your minds--it may grow dim and seem to be
forgotten--but there it is, like the inscription on a battered and
defaced coin, which comes out when you warm it.

[Hence the necessity to concentrate the attention on these cardinal
truths, and to discard a number of extraneous subjects commonly
supposed to be requisite whether for general culture of the medical
student or to enable him to correct the possible mistakes of
druggists. Against this "Latin fetish" in medical education, as he
used to call it, he carried on a lifelong campaign, as may be gathered
from his published essays on medical education, and from letters given
in later chapters of this book. But there is another side to such
limitation in professional training. Though literature is an essential
in the preliminary, general education, culture is not solely dependent
upon classics.]

Moreover, I would urge that a thorough study of Human Physiology is in
itself an education broader and more comprehensive than much that
passes under that name. There is no side of the intellect which it
does not call into play, no region of human knowledge into which
either its roots or its branches do not extend; like the Atlantic
between the Old and New Worlds, its waves wash the shores of the two
worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from both;
through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus,
lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; fa

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