Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 39

Joseph Dalton Hooker, F.R.S., K.C.S.I., President of the Royal Society 1873, the great botanist, then a.s.sistant Director at Kew Gardens to his father, Sir William Hooker.

Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F.R.S., M.P., the youngest of the nine, who had already made his mark in archeology, and was then preparing to bring out his "Prehistoric Times."

Herbert Spencer, who had already published "Social Statics," "Principles of Psychology," and "First Principles."

William Spottiswoode (1825-1883), F.R.S., Treasurer and afterwards President of the Royal Society 1878, who carried on the business of the Queen's printer as well as being deeply versed in mathematics, philosophy, and languages.

John Tyndall, F.R.S., (1820-1893), who had been for the last eleven years Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Inst.i.tution, where he succeeded Faraday as superintendent.

The one object, then, of the club was to afford a certain meeting-ground for a few friends who were bound together by personal regard and community of scientific interests, yet were in danger of drifting apart under the stress of circ.u.mstances. They dined together on the first Thursday in each month, except July, August, and September, before the meeting of the Royal Society, of which all were members excepting Mr.

Spencer, the usual dining hour being six, so that they should be in good time for the society's meeting at eight; and a minute of December 5, 1885, when Huxley was treasurer and revived the ancient custom of making some note of the conversation, throws light on the habits of the club.

"Got scolded," he writes, "for dining at 6.30. Had to prove we have dined at 6.30 for a long time by evidence of waiter." (At the February meeting, however, "agreed to fix dinner hour six hereafter.") "Talked politics, scandal, and the three cla.s.ses of witnesses--liars, d--d liars, and experts. Huxley gave account of civil list pension. Sat to the unexampled hour of 10 p.m., except Lubbock who had to go to Linnean."

For some time there was a summer meeting, which consisted of a week-end excursion of members and their wives (x's + yv's, as the correct formula ran) to some place like Burnham or Maidenhead, Oxford or Windsor; but this grew increasingly difficult to arrange, and dropped before very long.

Guests were not excluded from the dinners of the club; men of science or letters of almost every nationality dined with the x at one time or another; Darwin, W.K. Clifford, Colenso, Strachey, Tollemache, Helps; Professors Bain, Ma.s.son, Robertson Smith, and Bentham the botanist, Mr.

John Morley, Sir D. Galton, Mr. Jodrell, the founder of several scientific lectureships; Dr. Klein; the Americans Marsh, Gilman, A.

Aga.s.siz, and Youmans, the latter of whom met here several of the contributors to the "International Science Series" organised by him; and continental representatives, as Helmholtz, Laugel, and Cornu.

Small as the club was, the members of it were destined to play a considerable part in the history of English science. Five of them received the Royal Medal; three the Copley; one the Rumford, six were Presidents of the British a.s.sociation; three a.s.sociates of the Inst.i.tute of France; and from amongst them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents.]

I think, originally [writes Huxley, l.c.] there was some vague notion of a.s.sociating representatives of each branch of science; at any rate, the nine who eventually came together could have managed, among us, to contribute most of the articles to a scientific Encyclopaedia.

[They included leading representatives of half a dozen branches of science:--mathematics, physics, philosophy, chemistry, botany, and biology; and all were animated by similar ideas of the high function of science, and of the great Society which should be the chief representative of science in this country. However unnecessary, it was perhaps not unnatural that a certain jealousy of the club and its possible influence grew up in some quarters. But whatever influence fell to it as it were incidentally--and earnest men with such opportunities of mutual understanding and such ideals of action could not fail to have some influence on the progress of scientific organisation--it was a.s.suredly not sectarian nor exerted for party purposes during the twenty-eight years of the club's existence.]

I believe that the x [continues Huxley] had the credit of being a sort of scientific caucus, or ring, with some people. In fact, two distinguished scientific colleagues of mine once carried on a conversation (which I gravely ignored) across me, in the smoking-room of the Athenaeum, to this effect, "I say, A., do you know anything about the x Club?" "Oh, yes, B., I have heard of it. What do they do?" "Well, they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don't do it badly." If my good friends could only have been present at a few of our meetings, they would have formed a much less exalted idea of us, and would, I fear, have been much shocked at the sadly frivolous tone of our ordinary conversation.

[The x club is probably unique in the smallness of its numbers, the intellectual eminence of its members, and the length of its unchanged existence. The nearest parallel is to be found in "The Club." (Of which Huxley was elected a member in 1884. Tyndall and Hooker were also members.) Like the x, "The Club" began with eight members at its first meeting, and of the original members Johnson lived twenty years, Reynolds twenty-eight, Burke thirty-three, and Bennet Langton thirty-seven. But the ranks were earlier broken. Within ten years Goldsmith died, and he was followed in a twelvemonth by Nugent, and five years later by Beauclerk and Chamier. Moreover, the eight were soon increased to twelve; then to twenty and finally to forty, while the gaps were filled up as they occurred.

In the x, on the contrary, nearly nineteen years pa.s.sed before the original circle was broken by the death of Spottiswoode. From 1864 to Spottiswoode's death in 1883 the original circle remained unbroken; the meetings "were steadily continued for some twenty years, before our ranks began to thin; and one by one, geistige Naturen such as those for which the poet so willingly paid the ferryman, silent but not unregarded, took the vacated places."

(Nimm dann Fuhrmann, Nimm die Miethe Die Ich gerne dreifach biete; Zwei, die eben uberfuhren Waren geistige Naturen.)

The peculiar const.i.tution of the club scarcely seemed to admit of new members; not, at all events, without altering the unique relation of friendship joined to common experience of struggle and success which had lasted so long. After the death of Spottiswoode and Busk, and the ill-health of other members, the election of new members was indeed mooted, but the proposal was ultimately negatived. Huxley's opinion on this point appears from letters to Sir E. Frankland in 1886 and to Sir J.D. Hooker in 1888.]

As for the filling up the vacancies in the x, I am disposed to take Tyndall's view of the matter. Our little club had no very definite object beyond preventing a few men who were united by strong personal sympathies from drifting apart by the pressure of busy lives.

n.o.body could have foreseen or expected twenty odd years ago when we first met, that we were destined to play the parts we have since played, and it is in the nature of things impossible that any of the new members proposed (much as we may like and respect them all), can carry on the work which has so strangely fallen to us.

An axe with a new head and a new handle may be the same axe in one sense, but it is not the familiar friend with which one has cut one's way through wood and brier.

[And in the other letter:--]

What with the lame dog condition of Tyndall and Hirst and Spencer and my own recurrent illnesses, the x is not satisfactory. But I don't see that much will come from putting new patches in. The x really has no raison d'etre beyond the personal attachment of its original members. Frankland told me of the names that had been mentioned, and none could be more personally welcome to me...but somehow or other they seem out of place in the x.

However, I am not going to stand out against the general wish, and I shall agree to anything that is desired.

[Again:--]

The club has never had any purpose except the purely personal object of bringing together a few friends who did not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies had developed into big-wigs of various kinds, and therefore the club has incidentally--I might say accidentally--had a good deal of influence in the scientific world. But if I had to propose to a man to join, and he were to say, Well, what is your object? I should have to reply like the needy knife-grinder, "Object, G.o.d bless you, sir, we've none to show."

[As he wrote elsewhere (loc. cit.):--]

Later on, there were attempts to add other members, which at last became wearisome, and had to be arrested by the agreement that no proposition of that kind should be entertained, unless the name of the new may be suggested contained all the consonants absent from the names of the old ones. In the lack of Slavonic friends this decision put an end to the possibility of increase.

[After the death, in February 1892, of Hirst, a most devoted supporter of the club, who "would, I believe, represent it in his sole person rather than pa.s.s the day over," only one more meeting took place, in the following month. With five of the six survivors domiciled far from town, meeting after meeting fell through, until the treasurer wrote, "My idea is that it is best to let it die out un.o.bserved, and say nothing about its decease to anyone."

Thus it came to pa.s.s that the March meeting of the club in 1893 remained its last. No ceremony ushered it out of existence. Its end exemplified a saying of Sir J. Hooker's "At our ages clubs are an anachronism." It had met 240 times, yet, curious to say, although the average attendance up to 1883 was seven out of nine, the full strength of the club only met on twenty-seven occasions.

CHAPTER 1.19.

1865.

[The progress of the American civil war suggested to Huxley in 1865 the text for an article, "Emanc.i.p.ation, Black and White," the emanc.i.p.ation of the negro in America and the emanc.i.p.ation of women in England, which appeared in the "Reader" of May 20 ("Collected Essays" 3 66). His main argument for the emanc.i.p.ation of the negro was that already given in his letter to his sister; namely, that in accordance with the moral law that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man. And just as the negro will never take the highest places in civilisation yet need not to be confined to the lowest, so, he argues, it will be with women.] "Nature's old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected," [although]

"whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys justifies its application to girls as well."

[With this may be compared his letter to the "Times" of July 8, 1874 (Chapter 28).

No scientific monographs were published in 1865 by Huxley, but his lectures of the previous winter to working-men on "The various Races of Mankind" are an indication of his continued interest in Ethnology, which, set going, as has been said, by the promise to revise the woodcuts for Lyell's book, found expression in such papers as the "Human Remains in the Sh.e.l.l Mounds," 1863; the "Neanderthal Remains" of 1864; the "Methods and Results of Ethnology" of 1865; his Fullerian Lectures of 1866-67; papers on "Two Widely Contrasted Forms of the Human Cranium"

of 1866 and 1868; the "Patagonian Skulls" of 1868; and "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology" of 1871:--

His published ethnological papers (says Sir Michael Foster) are not numerous, nor can they be taken as a measure of his influence on this branch of study. In many ways he has made himself felt, not the least by the severity with which on the one hand he repressed the pretensions of shallow persons who, taking advantage of the glamour of the Darwinian doctrine, talked nonsense in the name of anthropological science, and on the other hand, exposed those who in the structure of the brain or of other parts, saw an impa.s.sable gulf between man and the monkey. The episode of the "hippocampus" stirred for a while not only science but the general public. He used his influence, already year by year growing more and more powerful, to keep the study of the natural history of man within its proper lines, and chiefly with this end in view held the Presidential Chair of the Ethnological Society in 1869-70. It was mainly through his influence that this older Ethnological Society was, a year later, in 1871, amalgamated with a newer rival society, the Anthropological, under the t.i.tle of "The Anthropological Inst.i.tute."

During this time he was constantly occupied with paleontological work, as the following letter to Sir Charles Lyell indicates:--]

Jermyn Street, November 27, 1865.

My dear Sir Charles,

I returned last night from a hasty journey to Ireland, whither I betook myself on Thursday night, being attracted vulture-wise by the scent of a quant.i.ty of carboniferous corpses. The journey was as well worth the trouble as any I ever undertook, seeing that in a morning's work I turned out ten genera of vertebrate animals of which five are certainly new; and of these four are Labyrinthodonts, amphibia of new types. These four are baptised Ophiderpeton, Lepterpeton, Ichthyerpeton, Keraterpeton. They all have ossified spinal columns and limbs. The special interest attaching to the two first is that they represent a type of Labyrinthodonts. .h.i.therto unknown, and corresponding with Siren and Amphiuma among living Amphibia. Ophiderpeton, for example, is like an eel, about three feet long with small fore legs and rudimentary hind ones.

In the year of grace 1861, there were three genera of European carboniferous Labyrinthodonts known, Archegosaurus, Scleroceplus, Parabatrachus.

The vertebral column of Archegosaurus was alone known, and it was in a remarkably imperfect state of ossification. Since that date, by a succession of odd chances, seven new genera have come into my hands, and of these six certainly have well-ossified and developed vertebral columns.

I reckon there are now about thirty genera of Labyrinthodonts known from all parts of the world and all deposits. Of these eleven have been established by myself in the course of the last half-dozen years, upon remains which have come into my hands by the merest chance.

Five and twenty years ago, all the world but yourself believed that a vertebrate animal of higher organisation than a fish in the carboniferous rocks never existed. I think the whole story is not a bad comment upon negative evidence.

January 1, 1865.

My dear Darwin,

I cannot do better than write my first letter of the year to you, if it is only to wish you and yours your fair share (and more than your fair share, if need be) of good for the New Year. The immediate cause of my writing, however, was turning out my pocket and finding therein an unanswered letter of yours containing a sc.r.a.p on which is a request for a photograph, which I am afraid I overlooked. At least I hope I did, and then my manners won't be so bad. I enclose the latest version of myself.

I wish I could follow out your suggestion about a book on zoology. (By the way please to tell Miss Emma that my last book IS a book. [The first volume of his Hunterian Lectures on "Comparative Anatomy." A second volume never appeared. Miss Darwin, as her father wrote to Huxley after the delivery of his Working Men's Lectures in 1862, "was reading your Lectures, and ended by saying, 'I wish he would write a book.' I answered, 'he has just written a great book on the skull.' 'I don't call that a book,' she replied, and added, 'I want something that people can read; he does write so well.'"] Marry come up! Does her ladyship call it a pamphlet?)

But I a.s.sure you that writing is a perfect pest to me unless I am interested, and not only a bore but a very slow process. I have some popular lectures on Physiology, which have been half done for more than a twelvemonth, and I hate the sight of them because the subject no longer interests me, and my head is full of other matters. [See letter of April 22, 1863.]