Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 25

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Eastbourne, January 13, 1890.

My dear Hooker,

We missed you on the 2nd, though you were quite right not to come in that beastly weather.

My boy Harry has had a very sharp attack of influenza at Bartholomew's, and came down to us to convalesce a week ago, very much pulled down. I hope you will keep clear of it.

Harry's work at the hospital is over at the end of March, and before the influenza business I was going to give him a run for a month or six weeks before he settled down to practice. We shall go to the Canaries as soon in April as possible. Are you minded to take a look at Teneriffe? Only 4 1/2 days' sea--good s.h.i.+ps.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

[However, Sir J. Hooker was unable to join "the excursion to the Isles of the Blest."]

Eastbourne, January 27, 1890.

My dear Foster,

People have been at me to publish my notice of Darwin in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society" in a separate form.

If you have no objection, will you apply to the Council for me for the requisite permission?

But if you DO see any objection, I would rather not make the request.

I think if I republish it I will add the "Times" article of 1859 to it.

Omega and Alpha!

Hope you are flouris.h.i.+ng. We shall be up for a few days next week.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Eastbourne, January 31, 1890.

My dear Foster,

Mind you let me know what points you think want expanding in the Darwin obituary when we meet.

We go to town on Tuesday for a few days, and I will meet you anywhere or anywhen you like. Could you come and dine with us at 4 P.M. on Thursday? If so, please let me know at once, that E. may kill the fatted calf.

Harry has been and gone and done it. We heard he had gone to Yorks.h.i.+re, and were anxious, thinking that at the very least a relapse after his influenza (which he had sharply) had occurred.

But the complaint was one with more serious sequelae still. Don't know the young lady, but the youth has a wise head on his shoulders, and though that did not prevent Solomon from overdoing the business, I have every faith in his choice.

Dr. Guillemard has kindly sent me a lot of valuable information; but as I suggested to my boy yesterday, he may find Yorks.h.i.+re air more wholesome than that of the Canaries, and it is ten to one we don't go after all.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[To his younger son:--]

Eastbourne, January 30, 1890.

You dear old humbug of a Boy,

Here we have been mourning over the relapse of influenza, which alone, as we said, could have torn you from your duties, and all the while it was nothing but an attack of palpitation such as young people are liable to and seem none the worse for after all. We are as happy that you are happy as you can be yourself, though from your letter that seems saying a great deal. I am prepared to be the young lady's slave; pray tell her that I am a model father-in-law, with my love. (By the way, you might mention her name; it is a miserable detail, I know, but would be interesting.) Please add that she is humbly solicited to grant leave of absence for the Teneriffe trip, unless she thinks Northampton air more invigorating.

Ever your loving dad,

T.H. Huxley.

On April 3, accompanied by his son, he left London on board the "Aorangi". At Plymouth he had time to meet his friend W.F. Collier, and to visit the Zoological Station, while], "to my great satisfaction,"

[he writes], "I received a revise (i.e. of 'Capital the Mother of Labour') for the May 'Nineteenth Century'--from Knowles. They must have looked sharp at the printing-office."

[It did not take him long to recover his sea-legs, and he thoroughly enjoyed even the rougher days when the rolling of the s.h.i.+p was too much for other people. The day before reaching Teneriffe he writes:--]

I have not felt so well for a long time. I do nothing, have a prodigious appet.i.te, and Harry declares I am getting fat in the face.

[Santa Cruz was reached early on April 10, and in the afternoon he proceeded to Laguna, which he made his headquarters for a week. That day he walked 10 miles, the next 15, and the third 20 in the course of the day. He notes finding the characteristic Euphorbia and Heaths of the Canaries; notes, too, one or two visitations of dyspepsia from indigestible food. He writes from Laguna:--]

From all that people with whom we meet tell me, I gather that the usual ma.s.sive lies about health resorts pervade the accounts of Teneriffe.

Santa Cruz would reduce me to jelly in a week, and I hear that Orotava is worse--stifling. Guimar, whither we go to-morrow, is warranted to be dry and everlasting suns.h.i.+ne. We shall see. One of the people staying in the house said they had rain there for a fortnight together...I am all right now, and walked some 15 miles up hill and down dale to-day, and I am not more than comfortably tired. However, I am not going to try the peak. I find it cannot be done without a night out at a considerable height when the thermometer commonly goes down below freezing, and I am not going to run that risk for the chance of seeing even the famous shadows.

[By some mischance, no letters from home reached him till the 26th, and he writes from Guimar on the 23rd:--]

A lady who lives here told me yesterday that a postmistress at one place was in the habit of taking off the stamps and turning the letters on one side! But that luckily is not a particular dodge with ours.

We drove over here on the 17th. It is a very picturesque place 1000 feet up in the midst of a great amphitheatre of high hills, facing north, orange-trees laden with fruit, date palms and bananas are in the garden, and there is lovely suns.h.i.+ne all day long. Altogether the climate is far the best I have found anywhere here, and the house, which is that of a Spanish Marquesa, only opened as a hotel this winter, is very comfortable. I am sitting with the window wide open at nine o'clock at night, and the stars flash as if the sky were Australian.

On Sat.u.r.day we had a splendid excursion up to the top of the pa.s.s that leads from here up to the other side of the island. Road in the proper sense there was none, and the track incredibly bad, worse than any Alpine path owing to the loose irregular stones. The mules, however, pick their way like cats, and you have only to hold on. The pa.s.s is 6000 feet high, and we ascended still higher. Fortune favoured us. It was a lovely day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet below. The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. [(The Canadas, which he calls] "the one thing worth seeing there.") It took us three hours and a half to get up, pa.s.sing for a good deal of the time through a kind of low brush of white and red cistuses in full bloom. We saw Palma on one side, and Grand Canary on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which enveloped all the lower part of the island. Coming down was worse than going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back about six.

About seven hours in the saddle and walking.

You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry. He is burnt deep red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and at the end of the journey he raced Gurilio, our guide, who understands no word of English any more than we do Spanish, but we are quite intimate nevertheless. [My brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far more effectual than the Spanish which my father persisted in trying upon the inhabitants. This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as to any Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much less beating him in a race over the stony track. His experience was entirely limited to invalids.]

He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his wife: "Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long without--never again." When, after all, the delayed letters reached him on his way back from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a traveller who brought them up from Laguna, he writes (April 24):--]

Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. n.o.body--children or any one else--can be to me what you are.

Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.

[Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto Orotava:--]