Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 38

It is a great pleasure to me that you like the article, for it was written very hurriedly, and I did not feel sure when I had done that I had always rightly represented your views.

Hang the two scalps up in your wigwam!

Flourens I could have believed anything of, but how a man of Kolliker's real intelligence and ability could have so misunderstood the question is more than I can comprehend.

It will be a thousand pities, however, if any review interferes with your saying something on the subject yourself. Unless it should give you needless work I heartily wish you would.

Everybody tells me I am looking so exceedingly well that I am ashamed to say a word to the contrary. But the fact is, I get no exercise, and a great deal of bothering work on our Commission's Cruise; and though much fatter (indeed a regular bloater myself), I am not up to the mark. Next year I will have a real holiday. [At the end of the year, as so often, he went off for a ploy with Tyndall, this time into Derbys.h.i.+re, walking vigorously over the moors.]

I am a bachelor, my wife and belongings being all at that beautiful place, Margate. When I came back I found them all looking so seedy that I took them off bag and baggage to that, as the handiest place, before a week was over. They are wonderfully improved already, my wife especially being abundantly provided with her favourite east wind. Your G.o.dson is growing a very st.u.r.dy fellow, and I begin to puzzle my head with thinking what he is and what he is not to be taught.

Please to remember me very kindly to Mrs. Darwin, and believe me, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following ill.u.s.trates the value he set upon public examinations as to a practical means for spreading scientific education, and upon first-rate examiners as a safeguard of proper methods of teaching.]

October 6, 1864.

My dear Hooker,

Donnelly told me to-day that you had been applied to by the Science and Tarts Department to examine for them in botany, and that you had declined.

Will you reconsider the matter? I have always taken a very great interest in the science examinations, looking upon them, as I do, as the most important engine for forcing science into ordinary education.

The English nation will not take science from above, so it must get it from below.

Having known these examinations from the beginning, I can a.s.sure you that they are very genuine things, and are working excellently. And what I have regretted from the first is that the botanical business was not taken in hand by you, instead of by --.

Now, like a good fellow, think better of it. The papers are necessarily very simple, and one of Oliver's pupils could look them over for you.

Let us have your co-operation and the advantage of that reputation for honesty and earnestness which you have contrived (Heaven knows how) to get.

I have come back fat and seedy for want of exercise. All my belongings are at Margate. Hope you don't think my review of Darwin's critics too heretical if you have seen it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

When is our plan for getting some kind of meeting during the winter to be organised?

[The next two letters refer to the award of the Copley Medal to Mr.

Darwin. Huxley was exceedingly indignant at an attempt on the part of the president to discredit the "Origin" by a side wind:--]

Jermyn Street, November 4, 1864.

My dear Darwin,

I write two lines which are NOT TO BE ANSWERED, just as to say how delighted I am at the result of the doings of the Council of the Royal Society yesterday. Many of us were somewhat doubtful of the result, and the more ferocious sort had begun to whet their beaks and sharpen their claws in preparation for taking a very decided course of action had there been any failure of justice this time. But the affair was settled by a splendid majority, and our ruffled feathers are smoothed down.

Your well-won reputation would not have been lessened by the lack of the Copley, but it would have been an indelible reproach to the Royal Society not to have given it to you, and a good many of us had no notion of being made to share that ignominy.

But quite apart from all these grand public-spirited motives and their results, you ought as a philanthropist to be rejoiced in the great satisfaction the award has given to your troops of friends, to none more than my wife (whom I woke up to tell the news when I got home late last night).

Yours ever,

T.H. Huxley.

Please remember us kindly to Mrs. Darwin, and make our congratulations to her on owning a Copley medallist.

Jermyn Street, December 3, 1864.

My dear Hooker,

I wish you had been at the Anniversary Meeting and Dinner, because the latter was very pleasant, and the former, to me, very disagreeable. My distrust of Sabine is as you know chronic, and I went determined to keep careful watch on his address, lest some crafty phrase injurious to Darwin should be introduced. My suspicious were justified. The only part of the address to Darwin written by Sabine himself contained the following pa.s.sage:--

"Speaking generally and collectively, we have expressly omitted it (Darwin's theory) from the grounds of our award."

Of course this would be interpreted by everybody as meaning that, after due discussion, the council had formally resolved not only to exclude Darwin's theory from the grounds of the award, but to give public notice through the president that they had done so, and furthermore, that Darwin's friends had been base enough to accept an honour for him on the understanding that in receiving it he should be publicly insulted!

I felt that this would never do, and therefore when the resolution for printing the address was moved, I made a speech which I took care to keep perfectly cool and temperate, disavowing all intention of interfering with the liberty of the president to say what he pleased, but exercising my const.i.tutional right of requiring the minutes of council making the award to be read, in order that the Society might be informed whether the conditions implied by Sabine had been imposed or not.

The resolution was read, and of course nothing of the kind appeared.

Sabine didn't exactly like it, I believe. Both Busk and Falconer remonstrated against the pa.s.sage to him, and I hope it will be withdrawn when the address is printed. [The pa.s.sage stands in the published address, but followed by another pa.s.sage which softens it down.]

If not there will be an awful row, and I for one will show no mercy.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The foundation of the x Club towards the earth 1864 was a notable event for Huxley and his circle of scientific friends. It was growing more and more difficult for them to see one another except now and again at meetings of the learned societies, and even that was quite uncertain.

The pressure of Huxley's own work may be inferred from his letters at this time (especially to Darwin, July 2, 1863, and January 16, 1864).

Not only society, but societies had to be almost entirely given up.

Moreover, the distance from one another at which some of these friends lived, added another difficulty, so that Huxley writes to Hooker in his]

"remote province" [of Kew:] "I wonder if we are ever to meet again in this world." [Accordingly in January 1864, Hooker gladly embraced a proposal of Huxley's to organise some kind of regular meeting, a proposal which bore fruit in the establishment of the x Club. On November 3, 1864, the first meeting was held at St. George's Hotel, Albemarle Street, where they resolved to dine regularly "except when Benham cannot have us, in which case dine at the Athenaeum." In the latter eighties, however, the Athenaeum became the regular place of meeting, and it was here that the "coming of age" of the club was celebrated in 1885.

Eight members met at the first meeting; the second meeting brought their numbers up to nine by the addition of W. Spottiswoode, but the proposal to elect a tenth member was never carried out. On the principle of lucus a non lucendo, this lent an additional appropriateness to the symbol x, the origin of which Huxley thus describes in his reminiscences of Tyndall in the "Nineteenth Century" for January 1894:--]

At starting, our minds were terribly exercised over the name and const.i.tution of our society. As opinions on this grave matter were no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--we finally accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the x Club; and the proposal of some genius among us, that we should have no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by acclamation.

[Besides Huxley, the members of the club were as follows:--

George Busk, F.R.S. (1807-87), then secretary of the Linnean Society, a skilful anatomist. (He served as surgeon to the hospital s.h.i.+p "Dreadnought" at Greenwich till 1856, when he resigned and, retiring from practice, devoted himself to scientific pursuits, and was elected President of the College of Surgeons in 1871.)

Edward Frankland (1825-1899), Foreign Secretary R.S., K.C.B., then Professor of Chemistry in the Royal Inst.i.tution, and afterwards at the Royal College of Science.

Thomas Archer Hirst, F.R.S., then mathematical master at University College School. (In 1865 appointed Professor of Physics; in 1867, of Pure Mathematics, at University College, London; and from 1873 to 1883 Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich; an old Marburg student, and intimate friend of Tyndall, whom he had succeeded at Queenwood College in 1853. He died in 1892.)