Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 16

I am very sorry to have missed you. I told my doctor that while the weather was bad it was of no use to go away, and when it was fine I might just as well stop at home; but he did not see the force of my reasoning, and packed us off here.

The award of the Copley is a kindness I feel very much...

The Congress [The International Geological Congress, at which he was to have presided.] seems to have gone off excellently. I consider that my own performance of the part of dummy was distinguished.

So the Lawes business is fairly settled at last! "Lawes Deo," as the Claimant might have said. But the pun will be stale, as you doubtless have already made all possible epigrams and punnigrams on the topic.

My wife joins with me in kindest regards to Mrs. Evans and yourself. If Mrs. Evans had only come up to the Maloja, she would have had real winter and no cold.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

10 Southcliff Terrace, Eastbourne, November 15, 1888.

My dear Hooker,

You would have it that the Royal Society broke the law in giving you the Copley, and they certainly violated custom in giving it to me the year following. Whoever heard of two biologers getting it one after another? It is very pleasant to have our niches in the Pantheon close together. It is getting on for forty years since we were first "acquent," and considering with what a very considerable dose of tenacity, vivacity, and that glorious firmness (which the beasts who don't like us call obstinacy) we are both endowed, the fact that we have never had the shadow of a shade of a quarrel is more to our credit than being ex-Presidents and Copley medallists.

But we have had a masonic bond in both being well salted in early life.

I have always felt I owed a great deal to my acquaintance with the realities of things gained in the old "Rattlesnake".

I am getting on pretty well here, though the weather has been mostly bad. All being well I shall attend the meeting of the Society on the 30th, but not the dinner. I am very sorry to miss the latter, but I dare not face the fatigue and the chances of a third dose of pleurisy.

My wife sends kindest regards and thanks for your congratulations.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

10 Southcliff Terrace, Eastbourne, November 17, 1888.

My dear Flower,

...Many thanks for taking my troublesomeness in good part. My friend will be greatly consoled to know that you have the poor man "in your eye." Schoolmaster, naturalist, and coal merchant used to be the three refuges for the incompetent. Schoolmaster is rapidly being eliminated, so I suppose the pressure on Natural History and coals will increase.

I am glad you have got the Civil Service Commissioners to listen to common sense. I had an awful battle with them (through the Department) over Newton, who is now in your paleontological department. If I recollect rightly, they examined him inter alia on the working of the Poor Laws!

The Royal Society has dealt very kindly with me. They patted me on the back when I started thirty-seven years ago, and it was a great encouragement. They give me their best, now that my race is run, and it is a great consolation. At the far end of life all one's work looks so uncommonly small, that the good opinion of one's contemporaries acquires a new value.

We have a summer's day, and I am writing before an open window!

Yesterday it blew great guns.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following letter to Lady Welby, the point of which is that to be "morally convinced" is not the same thing as to offer scientific proof, refers to an article in the "Church Quarterly" for October called "Truthfulness in Science and Religion," evoked by Huxley's "Nineteenth Century" article on "Science and the Bishops."]

November 27, 1888.

Dear Lady Welby,

Many thanks for the article in the "Church Quarterly", which I return herewith. I am not disposed to bestow any particular attention upon it; as the writer, though evidently a fair-minded man, appears to me to be entangled in a hopeless intellectual muddle, and one which has no novelty. Christian beliefs profess to be based upon historical facts.

If there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth, and if His biography given in the Gospels is a fiction, Christianity vanishes.

Now the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history is just as much a question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value of evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way. If any one tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but that it is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of miocene man.

Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we constantly, and in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon extremely bad evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in consequence. And surely one must be something worse than a born fool to pretend that such decision under the pressure of the enigmas of life ought to have the smallest influence in those judgments which are made with due and sufficient deliberation. You will see that these considerations go to the root of the whole matter. I regret that I cannot discuss the question more at length and deal with sundry topics put forward in your letter. At present writing is a burden to me.

[A letter to Professor Ray Lankester mixes grave and gay in a little homily, edged by personal experience, on the virtues and vices of combativeness.]

10 Southcliff Terrace, Eastbourne, December 6, 1888.

I think it would be a very good thing both for you and for Oxford if you went there. Oxford science certainly wants stirring up, and notwithstanding your increase in years and wisdom, I think you would bear just a little more stirring down, so that the conditions for a transfer of energy are excellent!

Seriously, I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Science might say to you as the Staffordshire collier's wife said to her husband at the fair, "Get thee foighten done and come whoam." You have a fair expectation of ripe vigour for twenty years; just think what may be done with that capital.

No use to tu quoque me. Under the circ.u.mstances of the time, warfare has been my business and duty.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Two more letters of the year refer to the South Kensington examinations, for which Huxley was still nominally responsible. As before, we see him reluctant to sign the report upon papers which he had not himself examined; yet at the same time doing all that lay in his power to a.s.sist by criticising the questions and thinking out the scheme of teaching on which the examination was to be based. He replies to some proposed changes in a letter to Sir M. Foster of December 12:--]

I am very sorry I cannot agree with your clients about the examination.

They should recollect the late Master of Trinity's aphorism that even the youngest of us is not infallible.

I know exactly upon what principles I am going, and so far as I am at present informed that advantage is peculiar to my side. Two points I am quite clear about--one is the exclusion of Amphioxus, and the other the retention of so much of the Bird as will necessitate a knowledge of Sauropsidan skeletal characters and the elements of skeletal h.o.m.ologies in skull and limbs.

I have taken a good deal of pains over drawing up a new syllabus--including dogfish--and making room for it by excluding Amphioxus and all of bird except skeleton. I have added Lamprey (cranial and spinal skeleton, NOT face cartilages), so that the intelligent student may know what a notochord means before he goes to embryology. I have excluded Distoma and kept Helix.

The Committee must now settle the matter. I have done with it.

[On December 27 he writes:--]

I have been thinking over the Examinership business without coming to any very satisfactory result. The present state of things is not satisfactory so far as I am concerned. I do not like to appear to be doing what I am not doing.

-- would of course be the successor indicated, if he had not so carefully cut his own throat as an Examiner...He would be bringing an action against the Lord President before he had been three years in office!...As I told Forster, when he was Vice-President, the whole value of the Examiner system depends on the way the examiners do their work. I have the gravest doubt about -- steadily plodding through the disgustful weariness of it as you and I have done, or observing any regulation that did not suit his fancy.

[With this may be compared the letter of May 19, 1889, to Sir J.

Donnelly, when he finally resolved to give up the "sleeping partnership" in the examination.

His last letter of the year was written to Sir J. Hooker, when transferring to him the "archives" of the x Club, as the new Treasurer.]

4 Marlborough Place, December 29, 1888.

My dear Hooker,