Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 27

With regard to what are especially your doctrines, I spoke much more favourably than I am reported to have done. I expressed no doubt as to their ultimate establishment, but as I particularly wished not to be misrepresented as an advocate trying to soften or explain away real difficulties, I did not in speaking enter into the details of what is to be said in diminishing the weight of the hybrid difficulty. All this will be put fully when I print the Lecture.

The arguments put in your letter are those which I have urged to other people--of the opposite side--over and over again. I have told my students that I entertain no doubt that twenty years' experiments on pigeons conducted by a skilled physiologist, instead of by a mere breeder, would give us physiological species sterile inter se, from a common stock (and in this, if I mistake not, I go further than you do yourself), and I have told them that when these experiments have been performed I shall consider your views to have a complete physical basis, and to stand on as firm ground as any physiological theory whatever.

It was impossible for me, in the time I had, to lay all this down to my Edinburgh audience, and in default of full explanation it was far better to seem to do scanty justice to you. I am const.i.tutionally slow of adopting any theory that I must needs stick by when I have gone in for it; but for these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will carry me further.

My wife and I were very grieved to hear you had had such a sick house, but I hope the change in the weather has done you all good. Anything is better than the damp warmth we had.

I will take great care of the three "Barriers." [A pamphlet called "The Three Barriers" by G.R., being notes on Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species"

1861, 8vo." Habitat, structure, and procreative power are given as these three barriers to Darwinism, against which natural theology takes its stand on Final Causes.] I wanted to cut it up in the "Sat.u.r.day," but how I am to fulfil my benevolent intentions--with five lectures a week--a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution and heaps of other things on my hands, I don't know.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

I am very glad to hear about Brown Sequard; he is a thoroughly good man, and told me it was worth while to come all the way to Oxford to hear the Bishop pummelled.

[In the above-mentioned letter to the "Scotsman" of January 24 he expresses his unfeigned satisfaction at the fulfilment of the three objects of his address, namely, to state fully and fairly his conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while feeling a.s.sured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise reach, in the certainty of a violent attack by [the 'Witness'."

The applause of the audience, he says, afforded him genuine satisfaction,] "because it bids me continue in the faith on which I acted, that a man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good-will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the a.s.sent, of his fellow-men."

[About this time a new field of interest was opened out to him, closely connected with, indeed, and completing, the ape question. Sir Charles Lyell was engaged in writing his "Antiquity of Man," and asked Huxley to supply him with various anatomical data touching the ape question, and later to draw him a diagram ill.u.s.trating the peculiarities of the newly discovered Neanderthal skull as compared with other skulls. He points out in his letters to Lyell that the range of cranial capacity between the highest and the lowest German--"one of the mediatised princes, I suppose" [The minor princes of Germany, whose territories were annexed to larger states, and who thus exchanged a direct for a mediate share in the imperial government.--or the Himalayan or Peruvian, is almost 100 per cent; in absolute amount twice as much as the difference between that of the largest simian and the smallest human capacity, so that in seeking an ordinal difference between man and the apes, "it would certainly be well to let go the head, though I am afraid it does not mend matters much to lay hold of the foot."

And on January 25, 1862:--]

I have been skull-measuring all day at the College of Surgeons. The NEANDERTHAL SKULL may be described as a slightly exaggerated modification of one of the two types (and the lower) of Australian skulls.

After the fashion of accounting for the elephant of old, I suppose it will be said that it was imported. But luckily the differences, though only of degree, are rather too marked for this hypothesis.

I only wish I had a clear six months to work at the subject. Little did I dream what the undertaking to arrange your three woodcuts would lead to. It will come in the long-run, I believe, to a new ethnological method, new modes of measurement, a new datum line, and new methods of registration.

If one had but two heads and neither required sleep!

[One immediate result of his investigations, which appeared in a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution (February 7, 1862), "On the Fossil Remains of Man," was incorporated in "Man's Place in Nature." But a more important consequence of this impulse was that he went seriously into the study of Ethnology. Of his work in this branch of natural science, Professor Virchow, speaking at the dinner given him by the English medical profession on October 5, 1898, declared that in the eyes of German savants it alone would suffice to secure immortal reverence for his name.

The concluding stage in the long controversy raised first at Oxford, was the British a.s.sociation meeting at Cambridge in 1862. It was here that Professor (afterwards Sir W.H.) Flower made his public demonstration of the existence in apes of the cerebral characters said to be peculiar to man.

From the 1st to the 9th of October Huxley stayed at Cambridge as the guest of Professor Fawcett at Trinity Hall, running over to Felixstow on the 5th to see his wife, whose health did not allow her to accompany him.

As President of Section D he had a good deal to do, and he describes the course of events in a letter to Darwin:--]

26 Abbey Place, October 9, 1862.

My dear Darwin,

It is a source of sincere pleasure to me to learn that anything I can say or do is a pleasure to you, and I was therefore very glad to get your letter at that whirligig of an a.s.sociation meeting the other day.

We all missed you, but I think it was as well you did not come, for though I am pretty tough, as you know, I found the pace rather killing.

Nothing could exceed the hospitality and kindness of the University people--and that, together with a great deal of speaking on the top of a very bad cold, which I contrived to catch just before going down, has somewhat used me up.

Owen came down with the obvious intention of attacking me on all points.

Each of his papers was an attack, and he went so far as to offer stupid and unnecessary opposition to proposals of mine in my own committee.

However, he got himself sold at all points...The Polypterus paper and the Aye-Aye paper fell flat. The latter was meant to raise a discussion on your views, but it was all a stale hash, and I only made some half sarcastic remarks which stopped any further attempts at discussion...

I took my book to Scotland but did nothing. I shall ask leave to send you a bit or two as I get on.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

A "Society for the propagation of common honesty in all parts of the world" was established at Cambridge. I want you to belong to it, but I will say more about it by and by.

[This admirable society, which was also to "search for scientific truth, especially in biology," seems to have been but short lived. At all events, I can find only two references to subsequent meetings, on October 7 and December 19 in this year.

A few days later a final blow was struck in the battle over the ape question. He writes on October 15 how he has written a letter to the "Medical Times"--his last word on the subject, summing up in most emphatic terms:--]

I have written the letter with the greatest care, and there is nothing coa.r.s.e or violent in it. But it shall put an end to all the humbug that has been going on...Rolleston will come out with his letter in the same number, and the smash will be awful, but most thoroughly merited.

[These several pieces of work, struck out at different times in response to various impulses, were now combined and re-shaped into "Man's Place in Nature," the first book which was published by him. Thus he writes to Sir Charles Lyell on May 5, 1862:--]

Of course I shall be delighted to discuss anything with you [Referring to the address on "Geological Contemporaneity" delivered in 1862 at the Geological Society.], and the more so as I mean to put the whole question before the world in another shape in my little book, whose t.i.tle is announced as "Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature." I have written the first two essays, the second containing the substance of my Edinburgh Lecture. I recollect you once asked me for something to quote on the Man question, so if you want anything in that way the MS. is at your service.

[Lyell looked over the proofs, and the following letters are in reply to his criticisms:--]

Ardrishaig, Loch Fyne, August 17, 1862.

My dear Sir Charles,

I take advantage of my first quiet day to reply to your letter of the 9th; and in the first place let me thank you very much for your critical remarks, as I shall find them of great service.

With regard to such matters as verbal mistakes, you must recollect that the greater part of the proof was wholly uncorrected. But the reader might certainly do his work better. I do not think you will find room to complain of any want of distinctness in my definition of Owen's position touching the Hippocampus question. I mean to give the whole history of the business in a note, so that the paraphrase of Sir Philip Egerton's line "To which Huxley replies that Owen he lies," shall be unmistakable.

I will take care about the Cheiroptera, and I will look at Lamarck again. But I doubt if I shall improve my estimate of the latter. The notion of common descent was not his--still less that of modification by variation--and he was as far as De Maillet from seeing his way to any vera causa by which varieties might be intensified into species.

If Darwin is right about natural selection--the discovery of this vera causa sets him to my mind in a different region altogether from all his predecessors--and I should no more call his doctrine a modification of Lamarck's than I should call the Newtonian theory of the celestial motions a modification of the Ptolemaic system. Ptolemy imagined a mode of explaining those motions. Newton proved their necessity from the laws and a force demonstrably in operation. If he is only right Darwin will, I think, take his place with such men as Harvey, and even if he is wrong his sobriety and accuracy of thought will put him on a far different level from Lamarck. I want to make this clear to people.

I am disposed to agree with you about the "emasculate" and "uncirc.u.mcised"-partly for your reasons, partly because I believe it is an excellent rule always to erase anything that strikes one as particularly smart when writing it. But it is a great piece of self-denial to abstain from expressing my peculiar antipathy to the people indicated, and I hope I shall be rewarded for the virtue.

As to the secondary causes I only wished to guard myself from being understood to imply that I had any comprehension of the meaning of the term. If my phrase looks naughty I will alter it. What I want is to be read, and therefore to give no unnecessary handle to the enemy. There will be row enough whatever I do.

Our Commission here [The Fishery Commission] implicates us in an inquiry of some difficulty, and which involves the interests of a great many poor people. I am afraid it will not leave me very much leisure. But we are in the midst of a charming country, and the work is not unpleasant or uninteresting. If the sun would only shine more than once a week it would be perfect.

With kind remembrances to Lady Lyell, believe me, faithfully yours,

T.H. Huxley.

We shall be here for the next ten days at least. But my wife will always know my whereabouts.

Jermyn Street, March 23, 1863.

My dear Sir Charles,