Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 36

[The following letter is interesting, as showing his continued interest in the question of skull structure, as well as his relation to his friend and fellow-worker, Dr. W.K. Parker.]

Jermyn Street, March 18, 1863.

My dear Parker,

Any conclusion that I have reached will seem to me all the better based for knowing that you have been near or at it, and I am therefore right glad to have your letter. If I had only time, nothing would delight me more than to go over your preparations, but these Hunterian Lectures are about the hardest bit of work I ever took in hand, and I am obliged to give every minute to them.

By and by I will gladly go with you over your vast material.

Did you not some time ago tell me that you considered the Y-shaped bone (so-called presphenoid) in the Pike to be the true basisphenoid? If so, let me know before lecture to-morrow, that I may not commit theft unawares.

I have arrived at that conclusion myself from the anatomical relations of the bone in question to the brain and nerves.

I look upon the proposition opisthotis = turtle's "occipital externe" = Perch's Rocher (Cuvier) as the one thing needful to clear up the unity of structure of the bony cranium; and it shall be counted unto me as a great sin if I have helped to keep you back from it. The thing has been dawning upon me ever since I read Kolliker's book two summers ago, but I have never had time to work it out.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following extracts from a letter to Hooker and a letter to Darwin describe the pressure of his work at this time.]

1863.

My dear Hooker,

...I would willingly send a paper to the Linnean this year if I could, but I do not see how it is practicable. I lecture five times a week from now till the middle of February. I then have to give eighteen lectures at the College of Surgeons--six on cla.s.sification, and twelve on the vertebrate skeleton. I might write a paper on this new Glyptodon, with some eighteen to twenty plates. A preliminary notice has already gone to the Royal Society. I have a decade of fossil fish in progress; a fellow in the country WILL keep on sending me splendid new Labyrinthodonts from the coal, and that d--d manual must come out.

Ayez pitie de moi.

T.H. Huxley.

Jermyn Street, July 2, 1863.

My Dear Darwin,

I am horribly loth to say that I cannot do anything you want done; and partly for that reason and partly because we have been very busy here with some new arrangements during the last day or two, I did not at once reply to your note.

I am afraid, however, I cannot undertake any sort of new work. In spite of working like a horse (or if you prefer it, like an a.s.s), I find myself scandalously in arrear, and I shall get into terrible hot water if I do not clear off some things that have been hanging about me for months and years.

If you will send me up the specimens, however, I will ask Flower (whom I see constantly) to examine them for you. The examination will be no great trouble, and I am ashamed to make a fuss about it, but I have sworn a big oath to take no fresh work, great or small, until certain things are done.

I wake up in the morning with somebody saying in my ear, "A is not done, and B is not done, and C is not done, and D is not done," etc., and a feeling like a fellow whose duns are all in the street waiting for him.

By the way, you ask me what I am doing now, so I will just enumerate some of the A, B, and C's aforesaid.

A. Editing lectures on Vertebrate skull and bringing them out in the "Medical Times."

B. Editing and re-writing lectures on Elementary Physiology, just delivered here and reported as I went along. ([Delivered on Friday evenings from April to June at Jermyn Street, and reported in the "Medical Times." They formed the basis of his well-known little book on "Elementary Physiology," published 1866. He writes on April 22:--]

"Macmillan has just been with me, and I am let in for a school book on physiology based on these lectures of mine. Money arrangements not quite fixed yet, but he is a good fellow, and will not do me unnecessarily.")

C. Thinking of my course of twenty-four lectures on the Mammalia at the College of Surgeons in next spring, and making investigations bearing on the same.

D. Thinking of and working at a "Manual of Comparative Anatomy" (may it be d--d); which I have had in hand these seven years.

E. Getting heaps of remains of new Labyrinthodonts from the Glasgow coalfield, which have to be described.

F. Working at a memoir on Glyptodon based on a new and almost entire specimen at the College of Surgeons.

G. Preparing a new decade upon Fossil fishes for this place.

H. Knowing that I ought to have written long ago a description of a most interesting lot of Indian fossils sent to me by Oldham.

I. Being blown up by Hooker for doing nothing for the "Natural History Review."

K. Being bothered by sundry editors just to write articles "which you know you can knock off in a moment."

L. Consciousness of having left unwritten letters which ought to have been written long ago, especially to C. Darwin.

M. General worry and botheration. Ten or twelve people taking up my time all day about their own affairs.

N. O. P. Q. R. S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. Z.

Societies.

Clubs.

Dinners, evening parties, and all the apparatus for wasting time called "Society." Colensoism and botheration about Moses...Finally pestered to death in public and private because I am supposed to be what they call a "Darwinian."

If that is not enough, I could exhaust the Greek alphabet for heads in addition.

I am glad to hear that Wyman thinks well of my book, as he is very competent to judge. I hear it is republished in America, but I suppose I shall get nothing out of it. [In this expectation, however, he was agreeably disappointed by the action of D. Appleton and Company.

An undated letter to Kingsley, who had suggested that he should write an article on Prayer, belongs probably to the autumn of 1863:--]

I should like very much to write such an article as you suggest, but I am very doubtful about undertaking it for "Fraser." Anything I could say would go to the root of praying altogether, for inasmuch as the whole universe is governed, so far as I can see, in the same way, and the moral world is as much governed by laws as the physical--whatever militates against asking for one sort of blessing seems to me to tell with the same force against asking for any other.

Not that I mean for a moment to say that prayer is illogical, for if the whole universe is ruled by fixed laws it is just as logically absurd for me to ask you to answer this letter as to ask the Almighty to alter the weather. The whole argument is an "old foe with a new face," the freedom and necessity question over again.

If I were to write about the question I should have to develop all this side of the problem, and then having shown that logic, as always happens when it is carried to extremes, leaves us bombinantes in vacuo, I should appeal to experience to show that prayers of this sort are not answered, and to science to prove that if they were they would do a great deal of harm.

But you know this would never do for the atmosphere of "Fraser." It would be much better suited for an article in my favourite organ, the wicked "Westminster."

However, to say truth, I do not see how I am to undertake anything fresh just at present. I have promised an article for "Macmillan" ages ago; and Ma.s.son scowls at me whenever we meet. I am afraid to go through the Albany lest Cook should demand certain reviews of books which have been long in my hands. I am just completing a long memoir for the Linnean Society; a monograph on certain fossil reptiles must be finished before the new year. My lectures have begun, and there is a certain "Manual"

looming in the background. And to crown all, these late events [the death of his brother] have given me such a wrench that I feel I must be prudent.

[The following reference to Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, has a quasi-prophetic interest:--]

May 7.