Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 16

So much for wives--now for WORMS--(I could not for the life of me help the alliteration). I, as right reverend father in worms and Bishop of Annelidae, do not think I ought to interfere with my most promising son, when a channel opens itself for the publication of his labours. So do what you will apropos of J--. If he does not do the worms any better than he did the zoophytes, he won't interfere with my plans.

I shall be glad to see Mrs. Buckland's Echinoderm. I think it must be a novelty by what you say. She is a very jolly person, but I have an unutterable fear of scientific women.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

May 6, 1855.

My ship is not come home but is coming, and I have been in a state of desperation at the continuous east winds. However, to-day there is a westerly gale, and if it lasts I shall have news soon. You may imagine that I am in an unsatisfactory state of mind between this and lecturing five times a week.

I beg to say that the "goods" I expect are home produce this transplanted (or sent a voyage as you do Madeira), and not foreign growth by any means. But it is five years since we met, I am another man altogether, and if my wife be as much altered, we shall need a new introduction. Correspondence, however active, is a poor subst.i.tute for personal communication and tells one but little of the inner life.

[Finally, on the eve of his marriage in July, Tyndall congratulates him on being appointed to deliver the next course of Fullerian Lectures at the Royal Inst.i.tution:--

The fates once seemed to point to our connection in a distant land: we are now colleagues at home, and I can claim you as my scientific brother. May the G.o.ds continue to drop fatness upon you, and may your next great step be productive of all the felicity which your warmest friends or your own rebellious heart can desire.

CHAPTER 1.9.

1855.

Miss Heathorn and her parents reached England at the beginning of May 1855, and took up their abode at 8 t.i.tchfield Terrace, not far from Huxley's own lodgings and his brothers' house. One thing, however, filled Huxley with dismay. Miss Heathorn's health had broken down utterly, and she looked at death's door. All through the preceding year she had been very ill; she had gone with friends, Mr. and Mrs. Wise, to the newly opened mining-camp at Bathurst, and she and Mrs. Wise were indeed the first women to visit it; returning to Sydney after rather a rough time, she caught a chill, and being wrongly treated by a doctor of the blood-letting, calomel-dosing school, she was reduced to a shadow, and only saved by another pract.i.tioner, who reversed the treatment just in time.

In his letters to her, Huxley had not at first realised the danger she had been in; and afterwards tried to keep her spirits up by a cheerful optimism that would only look forward to their joyful union and many years of unbroken happiness to atone for their long parting.

But the reality alarmed him. He took her to one of the most famous doctors of the day, as if merely a patient he was interested in. Then as one member of the profession to another, he asked him privately his opinion of the case. "I give her six months of life," said Aesculapius.]

"Well, six months or not," [replied Huxley,] "she is going to be my wife." [The doctor was mightily put out. "You ought to have told me that before." Of course, the evasive answer in such a contingency was precisely what Huxley wished to avoid. Happily another leading doctor held a much more favourable opinion, and said that with care her strength would come back, slowly but surely.]

14 Waverley Place, Wednesday.

My dear Hooker,

My wife and I met again on Sunday last, and I have established herself, her father and mother, close by me here at 8 t.i.tchfield Terrace, Regent's Park, and whenever you and Mrs. Hooker are in this part of the world, and can find time to call there, you will find her anything but surprised to see you.

G.o.d help me! I discover that I am as bad as any young fool who knows no better, and if the necessity for giving six lectures a week did not sternly interfere, I should be hanging about her ladyship's ap.r.o.n-strings all day. She is in very bad health, poor child, and I have some reason to be anxious, but I have every hope she will mend with care.

Oh this life! "atra cura," as old Thackeray has it, sits on all our backs and mingles with all our happiness. But if I go on talking in this way you will wonder what has come over my philosophership.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[Black Care was still in the background, but had relaxed her hold upon him. His spirits rose to the old point of gaiety. He writes how he gives a lively lecture to his students, and in the midst of it satan prompts him to crow or howl--a temptation happily resisted. He makes atrocious puns in bidding Hooker to the wedding, which took place on July 21.]

Jermyn Street, July 6, 1855.

My dear Hooker,

I ought long since to have thanked you in Thomson's name as well as my own for your "Flora Indica." Some day I promise myself much pleasure and profit from the digestion of the Introductory Essay, which is probably as much as my gizzard is competent to convert into nutrition.

I terminate my Baccalaureate and take my degree of M.A.-trimony (isn't that atrocious?) on Sat.u.r.day, July 21. After the unhappy criminals have been turned off, there will be refreshments provided for the sheriffs, chaplain, and spectators. Will you come? Don't if it is a bore, but I should much like to have you there.

[It was not a large party that a.s.sembled at the George Huxleys for the wedding, but all were life-long friends, including, besides the Fanning clan and Mrs. Griffiths, an old Australian ally, Hooker, Tyndall, and Dr. and Mrs. Carpenter. There was none present but felt that abundant happiness was at least well earned after eight years of trial, and still more that its best guarantee was the firm loyalty and devotion that had pa.s.sed through so many dangers of absence and isolation, so many temptations to renounce the ideal course under stress of circ.u.mstance, only to emerge strengthened and enn.o.bled by the stern discipline of much sacrifice.

Great as was his new happiness, he hardly stood in need of Darwin's word of warning: "I hope your marriage will not make you idle; happiness, I fear, is not good for work." Huxley could not sit idle for long. If he had no occupation on hand, something worth investigation--and thorough investigation--was sure to catch his eye. So he writes to Hooker from Tenby:--]

15 St. Julian's Terrace, Tenby, August 16, 1855.

My dear Hooker,

I am so near the end of the honeymoon that I think it can hardly be immodest if I emerge from private life and write you a letter, more particularly as I want to know something. I went yesterday on an expedition to see the remains of a forest which exists between tidemarks at a place called Amroth, near here.

So far as I can judge there can be no doubt that this really is a case of downward movement. The stools of the trees are in their normal position, and their roots are embedded and interwoven in a layer of stiff blue clay, which lies immediately beneath the superficial mud of the sh.o.r.e. Layers of leaves, too, are mixed up with the clay in other parts, and the bark of some of the trees is in perfect preservation. The condition of the wood is very curious. It is like very hard cheese, so that you can readily cut slices with a spade, and yet where more of the trunk has been preserved some parts are very hard. The trees are, I fancy, Beech and Oak. Could you identify slices if I were to send you some?

Now it seems to me that here is an opportunity one does not often have of getting some information about the action of sea water on wood, and on the mode in which these vegetable remains may become embedded, etc.

etc., and I want to get you to tell me where I can find information on submerged forests in general, so as to see to what points one can best direct one's attention, and to suggest any inquiries that may strike yourself.

I do not see how the stumps can occur in this position without direct sinking of the land, and that such a sinking should have occurred tallies very well with some other facts which I have observed as to the nature of the bottom at considerable depths here.

We had the jolliest cruise in the world by Oxford, Warwick, Kenilworth, Stratford, Malvern, Ross, and the Wye though it WAS a little rainy, and though my wife's strength sadly failed at times.

Still she was on the whole much better and stronger than I had any right to expect, and although I get frightened every now and then, yet there can be no doubt that she is steadily though slowly improving. I have no fears for the ultimate result, but her amendment will be a work of time.

We have really quite settled down into Darby and Joan, and I begin to regard matrimony as the normal state of man. It's wonderful how light the house looks when I come back weary with a day's boating to what it used to do.

I hope Mrs. Hooker is well and about again. Pray give her our very kind regards, and believe me, my dear Hooker, ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[At Tenby he stayed on through August and September, continuing his occupations of the previous summer, dredging up specimens for his microscope, and working partly for his own investigations, partly for the Geological Survey.

CHAPTER 1.10.

1855-1858.

Up to his appointment at the School of Mines, Huxley's work had been almost entirely morphological, dealing with the Invertebrates. His first investigations, moreover, had been directed not to species-hunting, but to working out the real affinities of little known orders, and thereby evolving a philosophical cla.s.sification from the limbo of "Vermes" and "Radiata."

He had continued the same work by tracing h.o.m.ologies of development in other cla.s.ses of animals, such as the Cephalous Mollusca, the Articulata, and the Brachiopods. On these subjects, also, he had a good deal of correspondence with other investigators of the same cast of mind, and even when he did not carry conviction, the impression made by his arguments may be judged from the words of Dr. Allman, no mean authority, in a letter of May 2, 1852:--]

I have thought over your arguments again and again, and while I am the more convinced of their ingenuity, originality, and STRENGTH, I yet feel ashamed to confess that I too must exclaim "tenax propositi." When was it otherwise in controversy?

[Other speculations arising out of these researches had been given to the public in the form of lectures, notably that on Animal Individuality at the Royal Inst.i.tution in 1852.

But after 1854, Paleontology and administrative work began to claim much of the time he would willingly have bestowed upon distinctly zoological research. His lectures on Natural History of course demanded a good deal of first-hand investigation, and not only occasional notes in his fragmentary journals, but a vast ma.s.s of drawings now preserved at South Kensington attest the amount of work he still managed to give to these subjects. But with the exception of the Hunterian Lectures of 1868, he only published one paper on Invertebrates as late as 1860; and only half a dozen, not counting the belated "Oceanic Hydrozoa," bear 1856 and 1859. The essay on the Crayfish did not appear until after he had left Jermyn Street and Paleontology for South Kensington.

The "Method of Paleontology," published in 1856, was the first of a long series of papers dealing with fossil creatures, the description of which fell to him as Naturalist to the Geological Survey. By 1860 he had published twelve such papers, and by 1871 twenty-six more, or thirty-eight in sixteen years.