Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 25

[As to his work at Yale Museum, he writes in the same letter:--]

We are hard at work still. Breakfast at 8.30--go over to the Museum with Marsh at 9 or 10--work till 1.30--dine--go back to Museum to work till 6. Then Marsh takes me for a drive to see the views about the town, and back to tea about half-past eight. He is a wonderfully good fellow, full of fun and stories about his Western adventures, and the collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw. I wish I could spare three weeks instead of one to study it.

To-morrow evening were are to have a dinner by way of winding up, and he has asked a lot of notables to meet me. I a.s.sure you I am being "made of," as I thought n.o.body but the little wife was foolish enough to do.

[On the 16th he left to join Professor Alexander Aga.s.siz at Newport, whence he wrote the following letters:--]

Newport, August 17, 1876.

My dear Marsh,

I really cannot say how much I enjoyed my visit to New Haven. My recollections are sorting themselves out by degrees and I find how rich my store is. The more I think of it the more clear it is that your great work is the settlement of the pedigree of the horse.

My wife joins with me in kind regards. I am yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[To Mr. Clarence King.]

Newport, August 19, 1876.

My dear Sir,

In accordance with your wish, I very willingly put into writing the substance of the opinion as to the importance of Professor Marsh's collection of fossils which I expressed to you yesterday. As you are aware, I devoted four or five days to the examination of this collection, and was enabled by Professor Marsh's kindness to obtain a fair conception of the whole.

I am disposed to think that whether we regard the abundance of material, the number of complete skeletons of the various species, or the extent of geological time covered by the collection, which I had the good fortune to see at New Haven, there is no collection of fossil vertebrates in existence, which can be compared with it. I say this without forgetting Montmartre, Siwalik, or Pikermi--and I think that I am quite safe in adding that no collection which has been hitherto formed approaches that made by Professor Marsh, in the completeness of the chain of evidence by which certain existing mammals are connected with their older tertiary ancestry.

It is of the highest importance to the progress of Biological Science that the publication of this evidence, accompanied by ill.u.s.trations of such fulness as to enable paleontologists to form their own judgment as to its value, should take place without delay.

I am yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Breaking their journey at Boston, they went from Newport to Petersham, in the highlands of Worcester County, where they were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. John Fiske, at their summer home. Among the other visitors were the eminent musical composer Mr. Paine, the poet Cranch, and daughters of Hawthorne and Longfellow, so that they found themselves in the midst of a particularly cheerful and delightful party. From Petersham they proceeded to Buffalo, the meeting-place that year of the American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, which my father had promised to attend. Here they stayed with Mr.

Marshall, a leading lawyer, who afterwards visited them in England.

Awake was spent at Niagara, partly in making holiday, partly in shaping the lectures which had to be delivered at the end of the trip.

As to the impression made upon him by the Falls--an experience which, it is generally presumed, every traveller is bound to record--I may note that after the first disappointment at their appearance, inevitable wherever the height of a waterfall is less than the breadth, he found in them an inexhaustible charm and fascination. As in duty bound, he, with my mother, completed his experiences by going under the wall of waters to the "Cave of the Winds." But of all things nothing pleased him more than to sit of an evening by the edge of the river, and through the roar of the cataract to listen for the under-sound of the beaten stones grinding together at its foot.

Leaving Niagara on September 2, they travelled to Cincinnati, a 20-hours' journey, where they rested a day; on the 4th another 10 hours took them to Nashville, where they were to meet his sister, Mrs.

Scott. Though 11 years his senior, she maintained her vigour and brightness undimmed, as indeed she did to the end of her life, surviving him by a few weeks. As she now stood on the platform at Nashville, Mrs. Huxley, who had never seen her, picked her out from among all the people by her piercing black eyes, so like those of her mother as described in the Autobiographical sketch ("Collected Essays"

1).

Nashville, her son's home, had been chosen as the meeting-place by Mrs. Scott, because it was not so far south nor so hot as Montgomery, where she was then living. Nevertheless in Tennessee the heat of the American summer was very trying, and the good people of the town further drew upon the too limited opportunities of their guest's brief visit by sending a formal deputation to beg that he would either deliver an address, or be entertained at a public dinner, or "state his views"--to an interviewer I suppose. He could not well refuse one of the alternatives; and the greater part of one day was spent in preparing a short address on the geology of Tennessee, which was delivered on the evening of September 7. He spoke for twenty minutes, but had scarcely any voice, which was not to be wondered at, as he was so tired that he had kept his room the whole day, while his wife received the endless string of callers.

The next day they returned to Cincinnati; and on the 9th went on to Baltimore, where they stayed with Mr. Garrett, then President of the Baltimore and Ohio railway.

The Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, for which he was to deliver the opening address, had been inst.i.tuted by its founder on a novel basis. It was devoted to post-graduate study; the professors and lecturers received incomes entirely independent of the pupils they taught. Men came to study for the sake of learning, not for the sake of pa.s.sing some future examination. The endowment was devoted in the first place to the furtherance of research; the erection of buildings was put into the background.] "It has been my fate," [commented Huxley,] "to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work them. A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace. Trustees have sometimes made a palace and called it a university."

[Half the fortune of the founder had gone to this university; the other half to the foundation of a great and splendidly equipped hospital for Baltimore. This was the reason why the discussion of medical training occupies fully half of the address upon the general principles of education, in which, indeed, lies the heart of his message to America, a message already delivered to the old country, but specially appropriate for the new nation developing so rapidly in size and physical resources.]

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things?...

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the nation.

[This address was delivered under circ.u.mstances of peculiar difficulty. The day before, an expedition had been made to Washington, from which Huxley returned very tired, only to be told that he was to attend a formal dinner and reception the same evening.] "I don't know how I shall stand it," [he remarked. Going to his room, he s.n.a.t.c.hed an hour or two of rest, but was then called upon to finish his address before going out. It seems that it had to be ready for simultaneous publication in the New York papers. Now the lecture was not written out; it was to be given from notes only. So he had to deliver it in extenso to the reporter, who took it down in shorthand, promising to let him have a longhand copy in good time the next morning. It did not come till the last moment. Glancing at it on his way to the lecture theatre, he discovered to his horror that it was written upon "flimsy," from which he would not be able to read it with any success.

He wisely gave up the attempt, and made up his mind to deliver the lecture as best he could from memory. The lecture as delivered was very nearly the same as that which he had dictated the night before, but with some curious discrepancies between the two accounts, which, he used to say, occurring as they did in versions both purporting to have been taken down from his lips, might well lead the ingenious critic of the future to p.r.o.nounce them both spurious, and to declare that the pretended original was never delivered under the circ.u.mstances alleged. (Cp. the incident at Belfast.)

There was an audience of some 2000, and I am told that when he began to speak of the time that would come when they too would experience the dangers of over-population and poverty in their midst, and would then understand what Europe had to contend with more fully than they did, a pin could have been heard to drop. At the end of the lecture, amid the enthusiastic applause of the crowd, he made his way to the front of the box where his hosts and their party were, and received their warm congratulations. But he missed one voice amongst them, and turning to where his wife sat in silent triumph almost beyond speech, he said,] "And have you no word for me?" [then, himself also deeply moved, stooped down and kissed her.

This address was delivered on Tuesday, September 12. On the 14th he went to Philadelphia, and on the 15th to New York, where he delivered his three lectures on Evolution on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, September 18, 20, and 22.

These lectures are very good examples of the skill with which he could present a complicated subject in a simple form, the subject seeming to unroll itself by the force of its own naked logic, and carrying conviction the further through the simplicity of its presentation.

Indeed, an unfriendly critic once paid him an unintended compliment, when trying to make out that he was no great speaker; that all he did was to set some interesting theory unadorned before his audience, when such success as he attained was due to the compelling nature of the subject itself.

Since his earlier lectures to the public on evolution, the paleontological evidences had been acc.u.mulating; the case could be stated without some of the reservations of former days; and he brings forward two telling instances in considerable detail, the one showing how the gulf between two such apparently distinct groups as Birds and Reptiles is bridged over by ancient fossils intermediate in form; the other ill.u.s.trating from Professor Marsh's new collections the lineal descent of the specialised Horse from the more general type of quadruped.

The farthest back of these was a creature with four toes on the front limb and three on the hind limb. Judging from the completeness of the series or forms so far, he ventured to indulge in a prophecy.]

Thus, thanks to these important researches, it has become evident that, so far as our present knowledge extends, the history of the horse-type is exactly and precisely that which could have been predicted from a knowledge of the principles of evolution. And the knowledge we now possess justifies us completely in the antic.i.p.ation that when the still lower Eocene deposits, and those which belong to the Cretaceous epoch, have yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of the innermost or first digit in front, with, probably, a rudiment of the fifth digit in the hind foot; while, in still older forms, the series of the digits will be more and more complete, until we come to the five-toed animals, in which, if the doctrine of evolution is well founded, the whole series must have taken its origin.

[Seldom has prophecy been sooner fulfilled. Within two months, Professor Marsh had discovered a new genus of equine mammals, Eohippus, from the lowest Eocene deposits of the West, which corresponds very nearly to the description given above.

He continues:--]

That is what I mean by demonstrative evidence of evolution. An inductive hypothesis is said to be demonstrated when the facts are shown to be in entire accordance with it. If that is not scientific proof, there are no merely inductive conclusions which can be said to be proved. And the doctrine of evolution, at the present time, rests upon exactly as secure a foundation as the Copernican theory of the motions of the heavenly bodies did at the time of its promulgation.

Its logical basis is of precisely the same character--the coincidence of the observed facts with theoretical requirements.

[He left New York on September 23.] "I had a very pleasant trip in Yankee-land," [he writes to Professor Baynes,] "and did NOT give utterance to a good deal that I am reported to have said there." [He reached England in good time for the beginning of his autumn lectures, and his ordinary busy life absorbed him again. He did not fail to give his London audiences the results of the recent discoveries in American paleontology, and on December 4, delivered a lecture at the London Inst.i.tution, "On Recent Additions to the Knowledge of the Pedigree of the Horse." In connection with this he writes to Professor Marsh:--]

4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., December 27, 1876.

My dear Marsh,

I hope you do not think it remiss of me that I have not written to you since my return, but you will understand that I plunged into a coil of work, and will forgive me. But I do not mean to let you slip away without sending you all our good wishes for its successor--which I hope will not vanish without seeing you among us.

I blew your trumpet the other day at the London Inst.i.tution in a lecture about the Horse question. I did not know then that you had got another step back as I see you have by the note to my last lecture, which Youmans has just sent me.

I must thank you very heartily for the pains you have taken over the woodcuts of the lectures. It is a great improvement to have the patterns of the grinders.

I promised to give a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution on the 21st January next, and I am thinking of discoursing on the Birds with teeth. Have you anything new to tell on that subject? I have implicit faith in the inexhaustibility of the contents of those boxes.

Our voyage home was not so successful as that out. The weather was cold and I got a chill which laid me up for several days, in fact I was not well for some weeks after my return. But I am vigorous again now.

Pray remember me kindly to all New Haven friends. My wife joins with me in kindest regards and good wishes for the new year. "Tell him we expect to see him next year."

I am, yours very faithfully,