Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 50

Thomas Common, Esq.

Hodeslea, August 31, 1894.

Dear Professor Seth,

I have come to a stop in the issue of my essays for the present, and I venture to ask your acceptance of the set which I have desired my publishers to send you.

I hope that at present you are away somewhere, reading novels or otherwise idling, in whatever may be your pet fashion.

But some day I want you to read the "Prolegomena" to the reprinted Romanes Lecture.

Lately I have been re-reading Spinoza (much read and little understood in my youth).

But that n.o.blest of Jews must have planted no end of germs in my brains, for I see that what I have to say is in principle what he had to say, in modern language.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following letters with reference to the long unfinished memoir on "Spirula" for the "Challenger" reports tell their own story. Huxley was very glad to find some competent person to finish the work which his illness had incapacitated him from completing himself. It had been a burden on his conscience; and now he gladly put all his plates and experience at the disposal of Professor Pelseneer, though he had nothing written and would not write anything. He had no wish to claim even joint authorship for the completed paper; when the question was first raised, he desired merely that it should be stated that such and such drawings were made by him; but when Professor Pelseneer insisted that both names should appear as joint authors, he consented to this solution of the question.]

Hodeslea, September 17, 1893.

Dear Mr. Murray [Now K.C.B. Director of the "Reports of the 'Challenger'."],

If the plates of Spirula could be turned to account a great burthen would be taken off my mind.

Professor Pelseneer is every way competent to do justice to the subject; and he has just what I needed, namely another specimen to check and complete the work; and besides that, the physical capacity for dissection and close observation, of which I have had nothing left since my long illness.

Will you be so good as to tell Professor Pelseneer that I shall be glad to place the plates at his disposal and to give him all the explanations I can of the drawings, whenever it may suit his convenience to take up the work?

Nothing beyond mere fragments remained of the specimen.

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

I return Pelseneer's letter.

Hodeslea, September 30, 1893.

Dear Professor Pelseneer,

I send herewith (by this post) a full explanation of the plates of Spirula (including those of which you have unlettered copies). I trust you will not be too much embarra.s.sed by my bad handwriting, which is a plague to myself as well as to other people.

My hope is that you will be good enough to consider these figures as materials placed in your hands, to be made useful in the memoir on Spirula, which I trust you will draw up, supplying the defects of my work and checking its accuracy.

You will observe that a great deal remains to be done. The muscular system is untouched; the structure and nature of the terminal circ.u.mvallate papilla have to be made out; the lingual teeth must be re-examined; and the characters of the male determined. If I recollect rightly, Owen published something about the last point.

If I can be of any service to you in any questions that arise, I shall be very glad; but as I am putting the trouble of the work on your shoulders, I wish you to have the credit of it.

So far as I am concerned, all that is needful is to say that such and such drawings were made by me.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Hodeslea, October 12, 1893.

Dear Professor Pelseneer,

I am very glad to hear from you that the h.o.m.ology of the cephalopod arms with the gasteropod foot is now generally admitted. When I advocated that opinion in my memoir on the "Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca," some forty years ago, it was thought a great heresy.

As to publication; I am quite willing to agree to whatever arrangement you think desirable, so long as you are kind enough to take all trouble (but that of "consulting physician") off my shoulders. Perhaps putting both names to the memoir, as you suggest, will be the best way. I cannot undertake to write anything, but if you think I can be of any use as an adviser or critic, do not hesitate to demand my services.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Although in February he had stayed several days in town with the Donnellys, who "take as much care of me as if I were a piece of old china," and had attended a levee and a meeting of his London University a.s.sociation, had listened with interest to a lecture of Professor Dewar, who "made liquid oxygen by the pint," and dined at Marlborough House, the influenza had prevented him during the spring from fulfilling several engagements in London; but after his return from Oxford he began to recruit in the fine weather, and found delightful occupation in putting up a rockery in the garden for his pet Alpine plants.

In mid June he writes to his wife, then on a visit to one of her daughters:--]

What a little goose you are to go having bad dreams about me--who am like a stalled ox--browsing in idle comfort--in fact, idle is no word for it. Sloth is the right epithet. I can't get myself to do anything but potter in the garden, which is looking lovely.

On June 21 he went to Cambridge for the Harvey Celebration at Gonville and Caius College, and made a short speech.]

The dinner last night [he writes] was a long affair, and I was the last speaker; but I got through my speech very well, and was heard by everybody, I am told.

[But as is the way with influenza, it was thrown off in the summer only to return the next winter, and on the eve of the Royal Society Anniversary Dinner he writes to Sir M. Foster:--]

I am in rather a shaky and voiceless condition, and unless I am more up to the mark to-morrow morning I shall have to forgo the dinner, and, what is worse, the chat with you afterwards.

[One consequence of the spring attack of influenza was that this year he went once more to the Maloja, staying there from July 21 to August 25.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, July 9, 1893.

My dear Hooker,

What has happened to the x meeting you proposed? However, it does not matter much to me now, as Hames, who gave me a thorough overhauling in London, has packed me off to the Maloja again, and we start, if we can, on the 17th.

It is a great nuisance, but the dregs of influenza and the hot weather between them have brought the weakness of my heart to the front, and I am gravitating to the condition in which I was five or six years ago.

So I must try the remedy which was so effectual last time.

We are neither of us very fit, and shall have to be taken charge of by a courier. Fancy coming to that!

Let me be a warning to you, my dear old man. Don't go giving lectures at Oxford and making speeches at Cambridge, and above all things don't, oh don't go getting influenza, the microbes of which would be seen under a strong enough microscope to have this form.