Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 32

T.H. Huxley.

[Meanwhile, he took the opportunity to make the child's birth a new link with his old friend, and wrote as follows :--]

14 Waverley Place, January 3, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

If I had nothing else to write about I must wish you a Happy New Year and many on 'em; but, in fact, my wife and I have a great favour to ask of you, which is neither more nor less than to stand G.o.dfather for our little son. You know my opinions on these matters, and I would not ask you to do anything I would not do myself, so if you consent, the clerk shall tell all the lies for you, and you shall be asked to do nothing else than to help devour the christening feed, and be as good a friend to the boy as you have been to his father.

My wife will have the youngster christened, although I am always in a bad temper from the time it is talked about until the ceremony is over.

The only way of turning the farce into a reality is by making it an extra bond with one's friends. On the other hand, if you have any objection to say, "all this I steadfastly believe," even by deputy, I know you will have no hesitation in saying so, and in giving me as frank a refusal as my request. [As against his dislike of consenting to a rite, to him meaningless, he was moved by a feeling which in part corresponded to Descartes' morale par provision,--in part was an acknowledgment of the possibilities of individual development, making it only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual organisation of its country, which it could either ignore or continue on reaching intellectual maturity.]

Let me know if you have any fault to find with the new "Review." I think you will see it would have been a dreadful business to translate all the German t.i.tles in the bibliography. I returned from a ramble about Snowdon with Busk and Tyndall on the 31st, all the better. My wife is decidedly improved, though she mends but slowly.

Our best wishes to you and all yours.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Any fragments from the rich man's table for the next Number of "N.H.R.?"

14 Waverley Place, January 6, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

My wife and I were very pleased to get your hearty and kind acceptance of G.o.dfathership. We shall not call upon you for some time, I fancy, as the mistress doesn't get strong very fast. However, I am only glad she is well as she is. She came down yesterday for the first time.

It is very pleasant to get such expressions of opinion as I have had from you, Lyell, and Darwin about the "Review." They make me quite hopeful about its prosperity, as I am sure we shall be able to do better than our first number.

I am glad you liked what I said in the opening of my article. [(In the "Natural History Review" 1861 page 67--]"The proof of his claim to independent parentage will not change the brutishness of man's lower nature; nor, except in those valet souls who cannot see greatness in their fellow because his father was a cobbler, will the demonstration of a pithecoid pedigree one whit diminish man's divine right of kingship over nature; nor lower the great and princely dignity of perfect manhood, which is an order of n.o.bility not inherited, but to be won by each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their fittest use.") I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of matter. I dislike them even more than I do the pietists.

Some of these days I shall look up the ape question again, and go over the rest of the organisation in the same way. But in order to get a thorough grip of the question, I must examine into a good many points for myself. The results, when they do come out, will, I foresee, astonish the natives.

I am cold-proof, and all the better for the Welsh trip. To say truth, I was just on the edge of breaking down when I went. Did I ever send you a letter of mine on the teaching of Natural History? It was published while you were away, and I forget whether I sent it or not. However, a copy accompanies this note...

Of course there will be room for your review and welcome. I have put it down and reckon on it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Huxley returned from the trip to Wales in time to be with his wife for the New Year. The plot she had made with Dr. Tyndall had been entirely successful. The threatened breakdown was averted. Wales in winter was as good as Switzerland. Of the ascent of Snowdon he writes on December 28:]

"Both Tyndall and I voted it under present circ.u.mstances as good as most things Alpine."

[His wife, however, continued in very weak health. She was prostrated by the loss of her little boy. So in the middle of March he gladly accepted Mr. Darwin's invitation for her and the three children to spend a fortnight in the quiet of his house at Down, where he himself managed to run down for a week end.] "It appears to me," [he writes to his wife,]

"that you are subjecting poor Darwin to a savage Tennysonian persecution. I shall see him looking like a martyr and across talk double science next Sunday."

[In April another good friend, Dr. Bence Jones, lent the invalid his house at Folkestone for three months. Unable even to walk when she went there, her recovery was a slow business. Huxley ran down every week; his brother George and his wife also were frequent visitors. Meanwhile he resolved to move into a new house, in order that she might not return to a place so full of sorrowful memories. On May 30 he effected the move to a larger house not half a mile away from Waverley Place--26 Abbey Place (now 23 Abercorn Place). Here also Mrs. Heathorn lived for the next year, my grandfather, over seventy as he was, being compelled to go out again to Australia to look after a business venture of his which had come to grief.

Meantime the old house was still on his hands for another year. Trying to find a tenant, he writes on May 21, 1861:--]

I met J. Tyndall at Ramsay's last night, and I think he is greatly inclined to have the house. I gave him your message and found that a sneaking kindness for the old house actuated him a good deal in wishing to take it. It is not a bad fellow, and we won't do him much on the fixtures.

[Eventually Tyndall and his friend Hirst established themselves there.

This spring Professor Henslow, Mrs. Hooker's father, a botanist of the first rank, and a man extraordinarily beloved by all who came in contact with him, was seized with a mortal illness, and lingered on without hope of recovery through almost the whole of April. Huxley writes:--]

Jermyn Street, April 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

I am very much grieved and shocked by your letter. The evening before last I heard from Busk that your father-in-law had been ill, and that you had been to see him, and I meant to have written to you yesterday to inquire, but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. G.o.d knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which always seemed to me more prominent in him than in any man I ever knew.

He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.

You know all these things as well as I do, and I know as well as you do that such thoughts do not cure heartache or a.s.suage grief. Such maladies, when men are as old as you and I are, are apt to hang about one a long time, but I find that if they are faced and accepted as part of our fair share of life, a great deal of good is to be got out of them. You will find that too, but in the meanwhile don't go and break yourself down with over wear and tear. The heaviest pull comes after the excitement of a catastrophe of this kind is over.

Believe in my affectionate sympathy with you, and that I am, my dear old fellow, yours ever,

T.H. Huxley.

[And again on the 18th:--]

Many thanks for your two letters. It would be sad to hear of life dragging itself out so painfully and slowly, if it were not for what you tell me of the calmness and wisdom with which the poor sufferer uses such strength as is left him.

One can express neither wish nor hope in such a case. With such a man what is will be well. All I have to repeat is, don't knock yourself up.

I wish to G.o.d I could help you in some way or other beyond repeating the parrot cry. If I can, of course you will let me know.

[In June 1861 a jotting in his notebook records that he is at work on the chick's skull, part of the embryological work which he took up vigorously at this time, and at once the continuation of his researches on the Vertebrate Skull, embodied in his Croonian lecture of 1858, and the beginning of a long series of investigations into the structure of birds. There is a reference to this in a very interesting letter dealing chiefly with what he conceived to be the cardinal point of the Darwinian theory:--]

26 Abbey Place, September 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

Yesterday being the first day I went to the Athenaeum after reading your note, I had a look at, and a good laugh over, the "Quarterly" article.

Who can be the writer?

I have been so busy studying chicken development, a difficult subject to which I had long ago made up my mind to devote my first spare time, that I have written you no word about your article in the "Gardener's Chronicle." I quite agree with the general tendency of your argument, though it seems to me that you put your view rather too strongly when you seem to question the position "that, as a rule, resemblances prevail over differences" between parent and offspring. Surely, as a rule, resemblances DO prevail over differences, though I quite agree with you that the latter have been far too much overlooked. The great desideratum for the species question at present seems to me to be the determination of the law of variation. Because no law has yet been made out, Darwin is obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous or a matter of chance, so that the bishops and superior clergy generally (the only real atheists and believers in chance left in the world) gird at him as if he were another Lucretius.

It is [in] the recognition of a tendency to variation apart from the variation of what are ordinarily understood as external conditions that Darwin's view is such an advance on Lamarck. Why does not somebody go to work experimentally, and get at the law of variation for some one species of plant?

What a capital article that was in the "Athenaeum" the other day apud the Schlagintweits. [The brothers Schlagintweit (four of whom were ultimately employed), who had gained some reputation for their work on the Physical Geography of the Alps, were, on Humboldt's recommendation, despatched by the East India Company in 1854-55-56 to the Deccan, and especially to the Himalayan region (where they were the first Europeans to cross the Kuenlun Mountains), in order to correlate the instruments and observations of the several magnetic surveys of India. But they enlarged the scope of their mission by professing to correct the great trigonometrical survey, while the contract with them was so loosely drawn up that they had practically a roving commission in science, to make researches and publish the results--up to nine volumes--in all manner of subjects, which in fact ranged from the surveying work to ethnology, and were crowned by an additional volume on Buddhism! The original cost to the Indian Government was estimated at 15 thousand pounds sterling; the allowances from the English Government during the inordinately prolonged period of arranging and publishing materials, including payment for sixty copies of each volume, atlas, and so forth, as well as personal payments, came to as much more.

Unfortunately the results were of less value than was expected. The attempt to correct the work done with the large instruments of the trigonometrical survey by means of far smaller instruments was absurd; away from the ground covered by the great survey the figures proved to be very inaccurate. The most annoying part of the affair was that it absorbed the State aid which might have been given to more valuable researches.

The Council of the Royal Society had been consulted as to the advisability of despatching this expedition and opposed it, for there were in the service of the Company not a few men admirably qualified for the duty, whose scientific services had received scant appreciation.

Nevertheless, the expedition started after all, with the approval of Colonel Sabine, the president. In the last months of 1866, Huxley drew up for the Royal Society a report upon the scientific value of the results of the expedition.] Don Roderigo is very wroth at being made responsible with Sabine, and indeed I think he had little enough to do with it.