Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 41

I could not refrain from glancing over it on the spot, and I perceive I shall have to put on my sharpest spectacles and best considering cap.

I shall not write till I have thought well on the whole subject.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

Jermyn Street, July 16, 1865.

My dear Darwin,

I have just counted the pages of your MS. to see that they are all right, and packed it up to send you by post, registered, so I hope it will reach you safely. I should have sent it yesterday, but people came in and bothered me about post time.

I did not at all mean by what I said to stop you from publis.h.i.+ng your views, and I really should not like to take that responsibility.

Somebody rummaging among your papers half a century hence will find "Pangenesis" and say, "See this wonderful antic.i.p.ation of our modern theories, and that stupid a.s.s Huxley preventing his publis.h.i.+ng them."

And then the Carlyleans of that day will make me a text for holding forth upon the difference between mere vulpine sharpness and genius.

I am not going to be made a horrid example of in that way. But all I say is, publish your views, not so much in the shape of formed conclusions, as of hypothetical developments of the only clue at present accessible, and don't give the Philistines more chances of blaspheming than you can help.

I am very grieved to hear that you have been so ill again.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, October 2, 1865.

My dear Darwin,

"This comes hoping you are well," and for no other purpose than to say as much. I am just back from seven weeks' idleness at Littlehampton with my wife and children, the first time I have had a holiday of any extent with them for years.

We are all flouris.h.i.+ng--the babies particularly so--and I find myself rather loth to begin grinding at the mill again. There is a vein of laziness in me which crops out uncommonly strong in your G.o.dson, who is about the idlest, jolliest young four year old I know.

You will have been as much grieved as I have been about dear old Hooker.

According to the last accounts, however, he is mending, and I hope to see him in the pristine vigour again before long.

My wife is gone to bed or she would join me in the kindest regards and remembrances to Mrs. Darwin and your family.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The sound judgment and nice sense of honour for which Huxley was known among his friends often led those who were in difficulties to appeal to him for advice. About this time a dispute arose over an alleged case of unacknowledged "conveyance" of information. Writing to Hooker, he says the one party to the quarrel failed to "set the affair straight with half a dozen words of frank explanation as he might have done;" as to the other, "like all quiet and mild men who do get a grievance, he became about twice as 'wud' as Berserks like you and me." Both came to him, so that he says, "I have found it very difficult to deal honestly with both sides without betraying the confidence of either or making matters worse." Happily, with his help, matters reached a peaceful solution, and his final comment is:--]

I don't mind fighting to the death in a good big row, but when A and B are supplying themselves from C's orchard, I don't think it is very much worth while to dispute whether B filled his pockets directly from the trees or indirectly helped himself to the contents of A's basket. If B has so helped himself, he certainly ought to say so like a man, but if I were A, I would not much care whether he did or not.

-- has been horribly disgusted about it, but I am not sure the discipline may not have opened his eyes to new and useful aspects of nature.

[The summer of 1865 saw the inception of an educational experiment--an International Education Society--to which Huxley gladly gave his support as a step in the right direction. He had long been convinced of the inadequacy of existing forms of education--survivals from the needs of a bygone age--to prepare for the new forms into which intellectual life was pa.s.sing. That educators should be content to bring up the young generation in the modes of thought which satisfied their forefathers three centuries ago, as if no change had pa.s.sed over the world since then, filled him with mingled amazement and horror.

The outcome of the scheme was the International College, at Spring Grove, Isleworth, under the headmasters.h.i.+p of Dr. Leonhard Schmitz; one of the chief members of the committee being Dr. (afterwards Sir) William Smith, while at the head of the Society was Richard Cobden, under whose presidency it had been registered some time before. John Stuart Mill, however, refused to join, considering that this was not the most needed reform in education, and that he could not support a school in which the ordinary theology was taught.

An article in the "Reader" for June 17, 1865, sketches the plan. The design was to give a liberal education to boys whether intended for a profession or for commerce. The education for both was the same up to a certain point, corresponding to that given in our higher schools, together with foreign languages and the elements of physical and social science, after which the courses bifurcated. (For a fuller account of the scientific education see below.) Special stress was laid on modern languages, both for themselves and as a preparation and help for cla.s.sical teaching. Accordingly, the International College was one of three parallel inst.i.tutions in England, France, and Germany, where a boy could in turn acquire a sound knowledge of all three languages while continuing the same course of education. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, however, proved fatal to the scheme.

Some letters to his friend Dr. W.K. Parker, show the good-fellows.h.i.+p which existed between them, as well as the interest he took in the style and success of Parker's work. (A man of whom he wrote (preface to Professor Jeffery Parker's "Life of W.K. Parker" 1893), that "in him the genius of an artist struggled with that of a philosopher, and not unfrequently the latter got the worst of the contest." He speaks too of his "minute accuracy in observation and boundless memory for details and imagination which absolutely rioted in the scenting out of subtle and often far-fetched a.n.a.logies.") Parker was hard at work on Birds, a subject in which his friend and leader also was deeply interested, and was indeed preparing an important book upon it.

Referring to his candidature for the Royal Society, he writes on February 21, 1865:] "With reference to your candidature, I am ready to bring your name forward whenever you like, and to back you with 'all my might, power, amity, and authority,' as Ess.e.x did Bacon (you need not serve me as Bacon did Ess.e.x afterwards), but my impression has been that you did not wish to come forward this year."

[And on November 2, 1866, congratulating him on his] "well-earned honour" [of the F.R.S.]--"Go on and prosper. These are not the things wise men work for; but it is not the less proper of a wise man to take them when they come unsought."

26 Abbey Place, December 3, 1865.

My dear Parker,

I have been so terribly pressed by my work that I have only just been able to finish the reading of your paper.

Very few pieces of work which have fallen in my way come near your account of the Struthious skull in point of clearness and completeness.

It is a most admirable essay, and will make an epoch in this kind of inquiry.

I want you, however, to remodel the introduction, and to make some unessential but convenient difference in the arrangement of some of the figures.

Secondly, full as the appendix is of most valuable and interesting matter, I advise you for the present to keep it back.

My reason is that you have done justice neither to yourself nor to your topics, and that if the appendix is printed as it stands, your labour will be in great measure lost.

You start subjects enough for half a dozen papers, and partly from the compression thus resulting, and partly from the absence of ill.u.s.trations, I do not believe there are half a dozen men in Europe who will be able to follow you. Furthermore, though the appendix is relevant enough--every line of it--to those who have dived deep, as you and I have--to any one else it has all the aspects of a string of desultory discussions. AS YOUR FATHER CONFESSOR, I FORBID THE PUBLICATION OF THE APPENDIX. After having had all this trouble with you I am not going to have you waste your powers for want of a little method, so I tell you.

What you are to do is this. You are to rewrite the introduction and to say that the present paper is the first of a series on the structure of the vertebrate skull; that the second will be "On the development of the osseous cranium of the Common Fowl" (and here (if you are good), I will permit you to introduce the episode on cartilage and membrane [illegible]); the third will be "On the chief modifications of the cranium observed in the Sauropsida."

The fourth, "On the mammalian skull."

The fifth, "On the skull of the Ichthyopsida."

I will give you two years from this time to execute these five memoirs; and then if you have stood good-temperedly the amount of badgering and bullying you will get from me whenever you come dutifully to report progress, you shall be left to your own devices in the third year to publish a paper on "The general structure and theory of the vertebrate skull."

You have a brilliant field before you, and a start such that no one is likely to catch you. Sit deliberately down over against the city, conquer it and make it your own, and don't be wasting powder in knocking down odd bastions with random sh.e.l.ls.

I write jestingly, but I really am very much in earnest. Come and have a talk on the matter as soon as you can, for I should send in my report.

You will find me in Jermyn Street, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday mornings, Thursday afternoon, but not Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon.

Send a line to say when you will come.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

CHAPTER 1.20.

1866.