Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 30

To use the only forcible expression, I "twig" your meaning perfectly, but I venture to think the parable does not apply. For the Geological Society is not, to my mind, a place of education for students, but a place of discussion for adepts; and the more it is applied to the former purpose the less competent it must become to fulfil the latter--its primary and most important object.

I am far from wishing to place any obstacle in the way of the intellectual advancement and development of women. On the contrary, I don't see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superst.i.tions; and to show you that my ideas are practical I have fully made up my mind, if I can carry out my own plans, to give my daughters the same training in physical science as their brother will get, so long as he is a boy. They, at any rate, shall not be got up as man-traps for the matrimonial market. If other people would do the like the next generation would see women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits--though I don't think that men have anything to fear from their compet.i.tion. But you know as well as I do that other people won't do the like, and five-sixths of women will stop in the doll stage of evolution to be the stronghold of parsondom, the drag on civilisation, the degradation of every important pursuit with which they mix themselves--"intrigues" in politics, and "friponnes" in science.

If my claws and beak are good for anything they shall be kept from hindering the progress of any science I have to do with.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Three letters to Mr. Spencer show that he had been reading and criticising the proofs of the "First Principles." With regard to the second letter, which gives reasons for rejecting Mr. Spencer's remarks about the power of inflation in birds during flight, it is curious to note Mr. Spencer's reply:--

How oddly the antagonism comes out even when you are not conscious of it! My authority was Owen! I heard him a.s.sign this cause for the falling of wounded birds in one of his lectures at the College of Surgeons.]

14 Waverley Place, September 3, 1860.

My dear Spencer,

I return your proofs by this post. To my mind nothing can be better than their contents, whether in matter or in manner, and as my wife arrived, independently, at the same opinion, I think my judgment is not one-sided.

There is something calm and dignified about the tone of the whole--which eminently befits a philosophical work which means to live--and nothing can be more clear and forcible than the argument.

I rejoice that you have made a beginning, and such a beginning--for the more I think about it the more important it seems to me that somebody should think out into a connected system the loose notions that are floating about more or less distinctly in all the best minds.

It seems as if all the thoughts in what you have written were my own, and yet I am conscious of the enormous difference your presentation of them makes in my intellectual state. One is thought in the state of hemp yarn, and the other in the state of rope. Work away, then, excellent rope-maker, and make us more ropes to hold on against the devil and the parsons.

For myself I am absorbed in dogs--gone to the dogs in fact--having been occupied in dissecting them for the last fortnight. You do not say how your health is.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

September 19, 1860.

My dear Spencer,

You will forgive the delay which has occurred in forwarding your proof when I tell you that we have lost our poor little son, our pet and hope.

You who knew him well, and know how his mother's heart and mine were wrapped up in him, will understand how great is our affliction. He was attacked with a bad form of scarlet fever on Thursday night, and on Sat.u.r.day night effusion on the brain set in suddenly and carried him off in a couple of hours. Jessie was taken ill on Friday, but has had the disease quite lightly, and is doing well. The baby has escaped. So end many hopes and plans--sadly enough, and yet not altogether bitterly. For as the little fellow was our greatest joy so is the recollection of him an enduring consolation. It is a heavy payment, but I would buy the four years of him again at the same price. My wife bears up bravely.

I have read your proofs at intervals, and you must not suppose they have troubled me. On the contrary they were at times the only things I could attend to. I agree in the spirit of the whole perfectly. On some matters of detail I had doubts which I am not at present clear-headed enough to think out.

The only thing I object to in toto is the ill.u.s.tration which I have marked at page 24. It is physically impossible that a bird's air-cells should be DISTENDED with air during flight, unless the structure of the parts is in reality different from anything which anatomists at present know. Blowing into the trachea is not to the point. A bird cannot blow into its own trachea, and it has no mechanism for performing a corresponding action.

A bird's chest is essentially a pair of bellows in which the sternum during rest and the back during flight act as movable wall. The air cells may all be represented as soft-walled bags opening freely into the bellows--there being, so far as anatomists yet know, no valves or corresponding contrivances anywhere except at the glottis, which corresponds with the nozzle and air valve both, of our bellows. But the glottis is always opened when the chest is dilated at each inspiration.

How then can the air in any air-cell be kept at a higher tension than the surrounding atmosphere?

Hunter experimented on the uses of the air sacs, I know, but I have not his work at hand. It may be that opening one of the air-cells interferes with flight, but I hold it very difficult to conceive that the interference can take place in the way you suppose. How on earth is a lark to sing for ten minutes together if the air-cells are to be kept distended all the while he is up in the air?

At any rate twenty other ill.u.s.trations will answer your purpose as well, so I would not select one which may be a.s.sailed by a carping fellow like

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

October 10, 1860.

My dear Spencer [This was written at the time when Mr. Spencer had issued a notice of discontinuance, and when measures were being taken to prevent it.],

"A wilful man must have his way," and if you won't let me contribute towards the material guarantees for the success of your book, I must be content to add twelve shillings' worth of moral influence to that I already meant to exert per annum in its favour.

I shall be most glad henceforth, as ever, to help your great undertaking in any way I can. The more I contemplate its issues the more important does it seem to me to be, and I a.s.sure you that I look upon its success as the business of all of us. So that if it were not a pleasure I should feel it a duty to "push behind" as hard as I can.

Have you seen this quarter's "Westminster?" The opening article on "Neo-Christianity" is one of the most remarkable essays in its way I have ever read. I suppose it must be Newman's. The "Review" is terribly unequal, some of the other articles being absolutely ungrammatically written. What a pity it is it cannot be thoroughly organised.

My wife is a little better, but she is terribly shattered. By the time you come back we shall, I hope, have reverted from our present hospital condition to our normal arrangements, but in any case we shall be glad to see you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following is, I think, the first reference to his fastidiousness in the literary expression and artistic completeness of his work. As he said in an after-dinner speech at a meeting in aid of the Literary Fund, "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing."

Anything that was to be published he subjected to repeated revision. And thus, apologising to Hooker for his absence, he writes (August 2, 1860):--]

I was sorry to have to send an excuse by Tyndall the other day, but I found I must finish the Pyrosoma paper, and all last Tuesday was devoted to it, and I fear the next after will have the like fate.

It constantly becomes more and more difficult to me to FINISH things satisfactorily.

[To Hooker also he writes a few days later:--]

I hope your ear is better; take care of yourself, there's a good fellow.

I can't do without you these twenty years. We have a devil of a lot to do in the way of smiting the Amalekites.

[Between two men who seldom spoke of their feelings, but let constant intercourse attest them, these words show more than the practical side of their friendship, their community of aims and interests. Quick, strong-willed, and determined as they both were, the fact that they could work together for over forty years without the shadow of a misunderstanding, presupposes an unusually strong friendship firmly based upon mutual trust and respect as well as liking, the beginning of which Sir J. Hooker thus describes:--

My first meeting your father was in 1851, shortly after his return from the "Rattlesnake" voyage with Captain Stanley. Hearing that I had paid some attention to marine zoology during the voyage of the Antarctic Expedition, he was desirous of showing me the results of his studies of the Oceanic Hydrozoa, and he sought me out in consequence. This and the fact that we had both embarked in the Naval service in the same capacity as medical officers and with the same object of scientific research, naturally led to an intimacy which was undisturbed by a shadow of a misunderstanding for nearly forty-five following years. Curiously enough, our intercourse might have dated from an earlier period by nearly six years had I accepted an appointment to the "Rattlesnake"

offered me by Captain Stanley, which, but for my having arranged for a journey to India, might have been accepted.

Returning to the purpose of our interview, the researches Mr. Huxley laid before me were chiefly those on the Salpae, a much misunderstood group of marine Hydrozoa. Of these I had amused myself with making drawings during the long and often weary months pa.s.sed at sea on board the "Erebus," but having other subjects to attend to, I had made no further study of them than as consumers of the vegetable life (Diatoms) of the Antarctic Ocean. Hence his observations on their life-history, habits, and affinities were on almost all points a revelation to me, and I could not fail to recognise in their author all the qualities possessed by a naturalist of commanding ability, industry, and power of exposition. Our interviews, thus commenced, soon ripened into a friendship, which led to an arrangement for a monthly meeting, and in the informal establishment of a club of nine, the other members of which were, Mr. Busk, Dr. Frankland, Mr. Hirst, Sir J. Lubbock, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Dr. Tyndall, and Mr. Spottiswoode.

Just a month after this letter to his friend, the same year which had first brought Huxley public recognition outside his special sphere brought him also the greatest sorrow perhaps of his whole life. I have already spoken of the sudden death of the little son in whom so much of his own and his wife's happiness was centred. The suddenness of the blow made it all the more crushing, and the mental strain, intensified by the sight of his wife's inconsolable grief, brought him perilously near a complete breakdown. But the birth of another son, on December 11, gave the mother some comfort; and as the result of a friendly conspiracy between her and Dr. Tyndall, Huxley himself was carried off for a week's climbing in Wales between Christmas and the New Year.

His reply to a long letter of sympathy in which Charles Kingsley set forth the grounds of his own philosophy as to the ends of life and the hope of immortality, affords insight into the very depths of his nature.

It is a rare outburst at a moment of intense feeling, in which, more completely than in almost any other writing of his, intellectual clearness and moral fire are to be seen uniting in a veritable pa.s.sion for truth:--]

14, Waverley Place, September 23, 1860.

My dear Kingsley,

I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife's account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits--and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you. My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them--and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the ma.s.s of mankind? To which my only reply was and is--Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.