Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 26

It is very pretty to look at, but all draughts. I compare it to the air of a big wash-house with all the doors open, and it was agreed that the likeness was exact.

[On May 2 he sailed for Madeira by the "German", feeling already "ten years younger" for his holiday. On the 3rd he writes:--]

The last time I was in this place was in 1846. All my life lies between the two visits. I was then twenty-one and a half and I shall be sixty-five to-morrow. The place looks to me to have grown a good deal, but I believe it is chiefly English residents whose villas dot the hill. There were no roads forty-four years ago. Now there is one, I am told, to Camera do Lobos nearly five miles long. That is the measure of Portuguese progress in half a century. Moreover, the men have left off wearing their pigtail caps and the women their hoods.

[To his youngest daughter:--]

Bella Vista Hotel, Funchal, May 6, 1890.

Dearest Babs,

This comes wishing you many happy returns of the day, though a little late in the arrival. Harry sends his love, and desires me to say that he took care to write a letter which should arrive in time, but unfortunately forgot to mention the birthday in it! So I think, on the whole, I have the pull of him. We ought to be back about the 18th or 19th, as I have put my name down for places in the "Conway Castle", which is to call here on the 12th, and I do not suppose she will be full. In the meanwhile, we shall fill up the time by a trip to the other side of the island, on which we start to-morrow morning at 7.30.

You have to take your own provisions and rugs to sleep upon and under, as the fleas la bas are said to be unusually fine and active. We start quite a procession with a couple of horses, a guide, and two men (owners of the nags) to carry the baggage; and I suspect that before to-morrow night we shall have made acquaintance with some remarkably bad apologies for roads. But the horses here seem to prefer going up bad staircases at speed (with a man hanging on by the tail to steer), and if you only stick to them they land you all right. I have developed so much prowess in this line that I think of coming out in the character of Buffalo Bill on my return. Hands and face of both of us are done to a good burnt sienna, and a few hours more or less in the saddle don't count. I do not think either of us have been so well for years.

You will have heard of our doings in Teneriffe from M--. The Canadas there is the one thing worth seeing, altogether unique. As a health resort I should say the place is a fraud--always excepting Guimar--and that, excellent for people in good health, is wholly unfit for a real invalid, who must either go uphill or downhill over the worst of roads if he leaves the hotel.

The air here is like that of South Devon at its best--very soft, but not stifling as at Orotava. We had a capital expedition yesterday to the Grand Corral--the ancient volcanic crater in the middle of the island with walls some 3000 feet high, all scarred and furrowed by ravines, and overgrown with rich vegetation. There is a little village at the bottom of it which I should esteem as a retreat if I wished to be out of sight and hearing of the pomps and vanities of this world. By the way, I have been pretty well out of hearing of everything as it is, for I only had three letters from M-- while we were in Teneriffe, and not one here up to this date. After I had made all my arrangements to start to-morrow I heard that a mail would be in at noon. So the letters will have to follow us in the afternoon by one of the men, who will wait for them.

We went to-day to lunch with Mr. Blandy, the head of the princ.i.p.al shipping agency here, whose wife is the daughter of my successor at the Fishery Office.

Well, our trip has done us both a world of good; but I am getting homesick, and shall rejoice to be back again. I hope that Joyce is flourishing, and Jack satisfied with the hanging of his pictures, and that a millionaire has insisted on buying the picture and adding a bonus. Our best love to you all.

Ever your loving Pater.

Don't know M--'s whereabouts. But if she is with you, say I wrote her a long screed (Number 8) and posted it to-day--with my love as a model husband and complete letter-writer.

[On returning home he found that the Linnean medal had been awarded him.]

4 Marlborough Place, May 18, 1890.

My dear Hooker,

How's a' wi' you? My boy and I came back from Madeira yesterday in great feather. As for myself, riding about on mules, or horses, for six to ten hours at a stretch--burning in sun or soaking in rain--over the most entirely breakneck roads and tracks I have ever made acquaintance with, except perhaps in Morocco--has proved a most excellent tonic, cathartic, and alterative all in one. Existence of heart and stomach are matters of faith, not of knowledge, with me at present. I hope it may last, and I have had such a sickener of invalidism that my intention is to keep severely out of all imprudences.

But what is a man to do if his friends take advantage of his absence, and go giving him gold medals behind his back? That you have been an accomplice in this nefarious plot--mine own familiar friend whom I trusted and trust--is not to be denied. Well, it is very pleasant to have toil that is now all ancient history remembered, and I shall go to the meeting and the dinner and make my speech in spite of as many possible devils of dyspepsia as there are plates and dishes on the table.

We were lucky in getting in for nothing worse than heavy rolling, either out or in. Teneriffe is well worth seeing. The Canadas is something quite by itself, a bit of Egypt 6000 feet up with a bare volcanic cone, or rather long barrow sticking up 6000 feet in the middle of it.

Otherwise, Madeira is vastly superior. I rode across from Funchal to Sao Vicente, up to Paul da Serra, then along the coast to Santa Anna, and back from Santa Anna to Funchal. I have seen nothing comparable except in Mauritius, nor anything anywhere like the road by the cliffs from Sao Vicente to Santa Anna. Lucky for me that my ancient nautical habit of sticking on to a horse came back. A good deal of the road is like a bad staircase, with no particular banisters, and a well of 1000 feet with the sea at the bottom. Your heart would rejoice over the great heaths. I saw one, the bole of which split into nearly equal trunks; and one of these was just a metre in circ.u.mference, and had a head as big as a moderate-sized ash. Gorse in full flower, up to 12 or 15 feet high. On the whole a singular absence of flowering herbs except Cinerarias and, especially in Teneriffe, Echium. I did not chance to see a Euphorbia in Madeira, though I believe there are some. In Teneriffe they are everywhere in queer shapes, and there was a thing that mimicked the commonest Euphorbia but had no milk, which I will ask you about when I see you. The Euphorbias were all in flower, but this thing had none. But you will have had enough of my scrawl.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

CHAPTER 3.7.

1890-1891.

[Three letters of the first half of the year may conveniently be placed here. The first is to Tyndall, who had just been delivering an anti-Gladstonian speech at Belfast. The opening reference must be to some newspaper paragraph which I have not been able to trace, just as the second is to a paragraph in 1876, not long after Tyndall's marriage, which described Huxley as starting for America with his t.i.tled bride.]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, February 24, 1890.

My dear Tyndall,

Put down the three half-pints and the two dozen to the partnership account. Ever since the "t.i.tled bride" business I have given up the struggle against the popular belief that you and I const.i.tute a firm.

It's very hard on me in the decline of life to have a lively young partner who thinks nothing of rushing six or seven hundred miles to perform a war-dance on the sainted G.O.M., and takes the scalp of Historicus as an hors d'oeuvre.

All of which doubtless goes down to my account just as my poor innocent articles confer a reputation for long-suffering mildness on you.

Well! well! there is no justice in this world! With our best love to you both.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[(The confusion in the popular mind continued steadily, so that at last, when Tyndall died, Huxley received the doubtful honour of a funeral sermon.)

Dr. Pelseneer, to whom the next letter is addressed, is a Belgian morphologist, and an authority upon the Mollusca. He it was who afterwards completed Huxley's unfinished memoir on Spirula for the "Challenger" report.]

4 Marlborough Place, June 10, 1890.

Dear Dr. Pelseneer,

I gave directions yesterday for the packing up and sending to your address of the specimens of Trigonia, and I trust that they will reach you safely.

I am rejoiced that you are about to take up the subject. I was but a beginner when I worked at Trigonia, and I had always promised myself that I would try to make good the many deficiencies of my little sketch. But three or four years ago my health gave way completely, and though I have recovered (no less to my own astonishment than to that of the doctors) I am compelled to live out of London and to abstain from all work which involves much labour.

Thus science has got so far ahead of me that I hesitate to say much about a difficult morphological question--all the more, as old men like myself should be on their guard against over-much tenderness for their own speculations. And I am conscious of a great tenderness for those contained in my ancient memoir on the "Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca." Certainly I am entirely disposed to agree with you that the Gasteropods and the Lamellibranchs spring from a common root--nearly represented by the Chiton--especially by a hypothetical Chiton with one sh.e.l.l plate.

I always thought Nucula the key to the Lamellibranchs, and I am very glad you have come to that conclusion on such much better evidence.

I am, dear Dr. Pelseneer, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Towards the end of June he went for a week to Salisbury, taking long walks in the neighbourhood, and exploring the town and cathedral, which he confessed himself ashamed never to have seen before.

He characteristically fixes its date in his memory by noting that the main part of it was completed when Dante was a year old.]

The White Hart, Salisbury, June 22, 1890.

My dear Donnelly,

Couldn't stand any more London, so bolted here yesterday morning, and here I shall probably stop for the next few days.

I have been trying any time the last thirty years to see Stonehenge, and this time I mean to do it. I should have gone to-day, but the weather was not promising, so I spent my Sunday morning in Old Sarum--that blessed old tumulus with nine (or was it eleven?) burgesses that used to send two members to Parliament when I was a child. Really you Radicals are of some use after all!