Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 19

"how well I am, so long as I walk eight or ten miles a day and don't work too much, but I find fifteen or sixteen miles my limit for comfort."

[For many years after this his favourite mode of recruiting from the results of a spell of overwork was to take a short walking tour with a friend. In April 1857 he is off for a week to Cromer; in 1860 he goes with Busk and Hooker for Christmas week to Snowdon; another time he is manoeuvred off by his wife and friends to Switzerland with Tyndall.

In Switzerland he spent his summer holidays both in 1856 and 1857, in the latter year examining the glaciers with Tyndall scientifically, as well as seeking pleasure by the ascent of Mont Blanc. As fruits of this excursion were published late in the same year, his "Letter to Mr.

Tyndall on the Structure of Glacier Ice" ("Phil. Mag." 14 1857), and the paper in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society," which appeared--much against his will--in the joint names of himself and Tyndall. Of these he wrote in 1893 in answer to an inquiry on the subject:--]

By the Observations on Glaciers I imagine you refer to a short paper published in "Phil. Mag." that embodied results of a little bit of work of my own. The Glacier paper in the "Phil. Trans." is essentially and in all respects Professor Tyndall's. He took up glacier work in consequence of a conversation at my table, and we went out to Switzerland together, and of course talked over the matter a good deal. However, except for my friend's insistence, I should not have allowed my name to appear as joint author, and I doubt whether I ought to have yielded. But he is a masterful man and over-generous.

[And in a letter to Hooker he writes:--]

By the way, you really must not a.s.sociate me with Tyndall and talk about OUR theory. My sole merit in the matter (and for that I do take some credit) is to have set him at work at it, for the only suggestion I made, namely that the veined structure was a.n.a.logous to his artificial cleavage phenomena, has turned out to be quite wrong.

Tyndall fairly MADE me put my name to that paper, and would have had it first if I would have let him, but if people go on ascribing to me any share in his admirable work I shall have to make a public protest. All I am content to share is the row, if there is to be one.

[The following letters to Hooker and Tyndall touch upon his Swiss trips of 1856 and 1857:--]

Berne, September 3, 1856.

I send you a line hence, having forgotten to write from Interlaken, whence we departed this morning.

The Weissthor expedition was the most successful thing you can imagine.

We reached the Riffelberg in 11 1/2 hours, the first six being the hardest work I ever had in my life in the climbing way, and the last five carrying us through the most glorious sight I ever witnessed.

During the latter part of the day there was not a cloud on the whole Monte Rosa range, so you may imagine what the Matterhorn and the rest of them looked like from the wide plain of neve just below the Weissthor.

It was quite a new sensation, and I would not have missed it for any amount; and besides this I had an opportunity of examining the neve at a very great height. A regularly stratified section, several hundred feet high, was exposed on the Cima di Jazi, and I was convinced that the Weissthor would be a capital spot for making observations on the neve and on other correlative matters. There are no difficulties in the way of getting up to it from the Zermatt side, tough job as it is from Macugnaga, and we might readily rig a tent under shelter of the ridge.

That would lick old Saussure into fits. All the Zermatt guides put the S. Theodul pa.s.s far beneath the Weissthor in point of difficulty; and you may tell Mrs. Hooker that they think the S. Theodul easier than the Monte Moro. The best of the joke was that I lost my way in coming down the Riffelberg to Zermatt the same evening, so that altogether I had a long day of it. The next day I walked from Zermatt to Visp (recovering Baedeker by the way), but my shoes were so knocked to pieces that I got a blister on my heel. Next day Voiture to Susten, and then over Gemmi to Kandersteg, and on Thursday my foot was so queer I was glad to get a retour to Interlaken. I found most interesting and complete evidences of old moraine deposits all the way down the Leuk valley into the Rhine valley, and I believe those little hills beyond Susten are old terminal moraines too. On the other side I followed moraines down to Frutigen, and great ma.s.ses of glacial gravel with boulders, nearly to the Lake of Thum.

My wife is better, but anything but strong.

Chamounix, August 16, 1857.

My wife sends me intelligence of the good news you were so kind as to communicate to her. I need not tell you how rejoiced I am that everything has gone on well, and that your wife is safe and well. Offer her my warmest congratulations and good wishes. I have made one matrimonial engagement for Noel already, otherwise I would bespeak the hand of the young lady for him.

It has been raining cats and dogs these two days, so that we have been unable to return to our headquarters at the Montanvert which we left on Wednesday for the purpose of going up Mont Blanc. Tyndall (who has become one of the most active and daring mountaineers you ever saw--so that we have christened him "cat"; and our guide said the other day "Il va plus fort qu'un mouton. Il faut lui mettre une sonnette") had set his heart on the performance of this feat (of course with purely scientific objects), and had equally made up his mind not to pay five and twenty pounds sterling for the gratification. So we had one guide and took two porters in addition as far as the Grande Mulets. He is writing to you, and will tell you himself what happened to those who reached the top--to wit, himself, Hirst, and the guide. I found that three days in Switzerland had not given me my Swiss legs, and consequently I remained at the Grands Mulets, all alone in my glory, and for some eight hours in a great state of anxiety, for the three did not return for about that period after they were due.

I was there on a pinnacle like St. Simon Stylites, and nearly as dirty as that worthy saint must have been, but without any of his other claims to angelic a.s.sistance, so that I really did not see, if they had fallen into a creva.s.se, how I was to help either them or myself. They came back at last, just as it was growing dusk, to my inexpressible relief, and the next day we came down here--such a set of dirty, sun-burnt, snow-blind wretches as you never saw.

We heartily wished you were with us. What we shall do next I neither know nor care, as I have placed myself entirely under Commodore Tyndall's orders; but I suppose we shall be three or four days more at the Montanvert, and then make the tour of Mont Blanc. I have tied up six pounds sterling in one end of my purse, and when I have no more than that I shall come back. Altogether I don't feel in the least like the father of a family; no more would you if you were here. The habit of carrying a pack, I suppose, makes the "quiver full of arrows" feel light.

115 Esplanade, Deal, September 3, 1857.

My dear Tyndall,

I don't consider myself returned until next Wednesday, when the establishment of No. 14 will reopen on its accustomed scale of magnificence, but I don't mind letting you know I am in the flesh and safe back.

The tour round Mont Blanc was a decided success; in fact, I had only to regret you were not with me. The grand glacier of the Allee Blanche and the view of Mont Blanc from the valley of Aosta were alone worth all the trouble. I had only one wet day, and that I spent on the Brenon Glacier; for, in spite of all good resolutions to the contrary, I cannot resist poking into the glaciers whenever I have a chance. You will be interested in my results, which we shall soon, I hope, talk on together at length.

As I suspected, Forbes has made a most egregious blunder. What he speaks of and figures as the "structure" of the Brenon is nothing but a peculiar arrangement of ENTIRELY SUPERFICIAL DIRT BANDS, DEPENDENT ON THE STRUCTURE, BUT NOT IT. The true structure is singularly beautiful and well marked in the Brenon, the blue veins being very close set, and of course wholly invisible from a distance of a hundred yards, which is less than that of the spot whence Forbes' view of the (supposed) structure is taken.

I saw another wonderful thing in La Brenon. About the middle of its length there is a step like this of about 20 or 30 feet in height. In the lower part (B) the structural planes are vertical; in the upper (A) they dip at a considerable angle. I thought I had found a case of unconformability, indicating a slip of one portion of the glacier over another, but when I came to examine the intermediate region (X) carefully, I found the structural planes at every intermediate angle, and consequently a perfect transition from the one to the other.

I returned by Aosta, the great St. Bernard, and the Col de Balme. Old Simond was quite affectionate in his discourse about you, and seemed quite unhappy because you would not borrow his money. He had received your remittance, and asked me to tell you so. He was distressed at having forgotten to get a certificate from you, so I said in mine I was quite sure you were well satisfied with him.

On our journey he displayed his characteristic qualities, Je ne sais pas being the usual answer to any topographical inquiries with a total absence of nerve, and a general conviction that distances were very great and that the weather would be bad. However, we got on very well, and I was sorry to part with him.

I came home by way of Neuchatel, paying a visit to the Pierre a Bot, which I have long wished to see. My financial calculations were perfect in theory, but nearly broke down in practice, inasmuch as I was twice obliged to travel first-cla.s.s when I calculated on second. The result was that my personal expenses between Paris and London amounted to 1.50!! and I arrived at my own house hungry and with a remainder of a few centimes. I should think that your fate must have been similar.

Many thanks for writing to my wife. She sends her kindest remembrances to you.

Ever yours,

T.H.H.

[The year 1857 was the last in which Huxley apparently had time to go so far in journal-writing as to draw up a balance-sheet at the year's end of work done and work undone. Though he finds] "as usual a lamentable difference between agenda and acta; many things proposed to be done not done, and many things not thought of finished," [still there is enough noted to satisfy most energetic people. Mention has already been made of his lectures--sixty-six at Jermyn Street, twelve Fullerian, and as many more to prepare for the next year's course; seven to working men, and one at the Royal Inst.i.tution, together with the rearrangement of specimens at the Jermyn Street Museum, and the preparation of the Explanatory Catalogue, which this year was published to the extent of the Introduction and the Tertiary collections. To these may be added examinations at the London University, where he had succeeded Dr.

Carpenter as examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in 1856, reviews, translations, a report on Deep Sea Soundings, and ten scientific memoirs.

The most important of the unfinished work consists of the long-delayed "Oceanic Hydrozoa," the "Manual of Comparative Anatomy," and a report on Fisheries. The rest of the unfinished programme shows the usual commixture of technical studies in anatomy and paleontology, with essays on the philosophical and educational bearings of his work. On the one hand are memoirs of Daphnia, Nautilus, and the Herring, the affinities of the Paleozoic Crustacea, the Ascidian Catalogue and Positive Histology; on the other, the Literature of the Drift, a review of the present state of philosophical anatomy, and a scheme for arranging the Explanatory Catalogue to serve as an introductory textbook to the Jermyn Street lectures and the paleontological demonstrations. Here, too, would fall a proposed "Letter on the Study of Comparative Anatomy," to do for those subjects what Henslow had done in his "Letter" for Botany.

In addition to the fact of his being forced to take up Paleontology, it was perhaps the philosophic breadth of view with which he regarded his subject at any time, and the desire of getting to the bottom of each subsidiary problem arising from it, that made him for many years seem constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly off at a tangent from the line in which he was a.s.sured of unrivalled success did he but devote to it his undivided powers. But he was prepared to endure the charge of desultoriness with equanimity. In part, he was still studying the whole field of biological science before he would claim to be a master in one department; in part, he could not yet tell to what post he might succeed when he left--as he fully expected to leave--the Professorship at Jermyn Street.

One characteristic of his early papers should not pa.s.s unnoticed. This was his familiarity with the best that had been written on his subjects abroad as well as in England. Thoroughness in this respect was rendered easier by the fact that he read French and German with almost as much facility as his mother tongue. "It is true, of course, that scientific men read French and German before the time of Huxley; but the deliberate consultation of all the authorities available has been maintained in historical succession since Huxley's earliest papers, and was absent in the papers of his early contemporaries." (P. Chalmers Mitch.e.l.l in "Natural Science" August 1895.)

About this time his activity in several branches of science began to find recognition from scientific societies at home and abroad. In 1857 he was elected honorary member of the Microscopical Society of Giessen; and in the same year, of a more important body, the Academy of Breslau (Imperialis Academia Caesariana Naturae Curiosum). He writes to Hooker:--]

14 Waverley Place, April 3, 1857.

Having subsided from standing upon my head--which was the immediate causation of your correspondence about the co-extension Imperialis Academia Caesariana Naturae Curiosum (don't I know their thundering long t.i.tle well!)--I have to say that I was born on the 4th of May of the year 1825, whereby I have now more or less mis-spent thirty-one years and a bittock, nigh on thirty-two.

Furthermore, my locus natalis is Ealing, in the county of Middles.e.x.

Upon my word, it is very obliging of the "curious naturals," and I must say wholly surprising and unexpected.

I shall hold up my head immensely to-morrow when (blessed be the Lord) I give my last Fullerian.

Among other things, I am going to take Cuvier's crack case of the 'Possum of Montmartre as an ill.u.s.tration of MY views.

I wondered what had become of you, but the people have come talking about me this last lecture or two, so I supposed you had erupted to Kew.

My glacier article is out; tell me what you think of it some day.

I wrote a civil note to Forbes yesterday, charging myself with my crime, and I hope that is the end of the business. [Princ.i.p.al James Forbes, with whose theory of glaciers Huxley and Tyndall disagreed.]

My wife is mending slowly, and if she were here would desire to be remembered to you.

[In December 1858 he became a Fellow of the Linnean, and the following month not only Fellow but Secretary of the Geological Society.

In 1858 also he was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule 2, which provides that the committee shall yearly elect a limited number of persons distinguished in art, science, or letters. His proposer was Sir R. Murchison, who wrote:--

Athenaeum, January 26.

My dear Huxley,