Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 12

I have been having a great deal of talk with myself about my future career too, and I have often thought over what you say in the letter you wrote to the Puy. I don't quite understand what -- meant about the disputed reputation, unless it is a reputation for getting into disputes. But to say truth I am not greatly concerned about any reputation except that of being entirely honest and straightforward, and that reputation I think and hope I have.

For the rest...the part I have to play is not to found a new school of thought or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old schools. We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement. But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to succ.u.mb after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues vast political and social troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole.

But this organisation will be the work of generations of men, and those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions. I may be able to help a little in this direction--perhaps I may have helped already. For the present, however, I am disposed to draw myself back entirely into my own branch of physical science. There is enough and to spare for me to do in that line, and, for years to come, I do not mean to be tempted out of it.

[Strangely enough, this was the one thing he was destined not to do.

Official work multiplied about him. From 1870 to 1884 only two years pa.s.sed without his serving on one or two Royal Commissions. He was Secretary of the Royal Society from 1871 to 1880, and President from 1883 to his retirement, owing to ill-health, in 1885. He became Dean as well as Professor of Biology in the College of Science, and Inspector of Fisheries. Though he still managed to find some time for anatomical investigations, and would steal a precious hour or half-hour by driving back from the Home Office to his laboratory at South Kensington before returning home to St. John's Wood, the amount of such work as he was able to publish could not be very great.

His most important contributions during this decennium (writes Sir M.

Foster) were in part continuations of his former labours, such as the paper and subsequent full memoir on Stagonolepis, which appeared in 1875 and 1877, and papers on the Skull. The facts that he called a communication to the Royal Society, in 1875 (written 1874.), on Amphioxus, a preliminary note, and that a paper read to the Zoological Society in 1876, on Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked Number 1 of the series of Contributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before him the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when opportunity offered; but, alas! the opportunity which came was small, the preliminary note had no full successor, and Number 1 was only followed, and that after an interval of seven years, by a brief Number 2. A paper "On the Characters of the Pelvis," in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society," in 1879, is full of suggestive thought, but its concluding pa.s.sages seem to suggest that others, and not he himself, were to carry out the ideas. Most of the papers of this decennium deal with vertebrate morphology, and are more or less connected with his former researches, but in one respect, at least, he broke quite fresh ground. He had chosen the crayfish as one of the lessons for the cla.s.s in general biology spoken of above, and was thus drawn into an interesting study of crayfishes, by which he was led to a novel and important a.n.a.lysis of the gill plumes as evidence of affinity and separation. He embodied the main results of his studies in a paper to the Zoological Society, and treated the whole subject in a more popular style in a book on the Crayfish. In a somewhat similar way, having taken the dog as an object lesson in mammalian anatomy for his students, he was led to a closer study of that common animal, resulting in papers on that subject to the Zoological Society in 1880, and in two lectures at the Royal Inst.i.tution in 1880. He had intended so to develop this study of the dog as to make it tell the tale of mammalian morphology; but this purpose, too, remained unaccomplished.

Moreover, though he sent one paper (on Hyperodapedon Gordoni) to the Geological Society as late as 1887, yet the complete breakdown of his health in 1885, which released him from nearly all his official duties, at the same time dulled his ardour for anatomical pursuits.

Stooping over his work became an impossibility.

Though he carried about him, as does every man of like calibre and experience, a heavy load of fragments of inquiry begun but never finished, and as heavy a load of ideas for promising investigations never so much as even touched, though his love of science and belief in it might never have wavered, though he never doubted the value of the results which further research would surely bring him, there was something working within him which made his hand, when turned to anatomical science, so heavy that he could not lift it. Not even that which was so strong within him, the duty of fulfilling a promise, could bring him to the work. In his room at South Kensington, where for a quarter of a century he had laboured with such brilliant effect, there lay on his working table for months, indeed for years, partly dissected specimens of the rare and little studied marine animal, Spirula, of which he had promised to contribute an account to the Reports of the "Challenger" Expedition, and hard by lay the already engraven plates; there was still wanted nothing more than some further investigation and the working out of the results. But it seemed as if some hidden hands were always being stretched out to keep him from the task; and eventually another labourer had to complete it. (Ibid.)

The remaining letters of this year include several to Dr. Dohrn, which show the continued interest my father took in the great project of the Biological Station at Naples, which was carried through in spite of many difficulties. He had various books and proceedings of learned societies sent out at Dr. Dohrn's request (I omit the details), and proposed a scheme for raising funds towards completing the building when the contractor failed. The scheme, however, was not put into execution.]

4 Marlborough Place, February 24, 1873.

My dear Dohrn,

I was very glad to receive the fine sealed letter, and to get some news of you--though to be sure there is not much of you in the letter, but all is "Station, Station."

I congratulate you heartily on your success with your undertaking, and I only wish I could see England represented among the applicants for tables. But you see England is so poor, and the present price of coals obliges her to economise.

I envy you your visit from "Pater Anchises" Baer, and rejoice to hear that the grand old man is well and strong enough to entertain such a project. I wish I could see my way to doing the like. I have had a long bout of illness--ever since August--but I am now very much better, indeed, I hope I may say quite well. The weariness of all this has been complicated by the trouble of getting into a new house, and in addition a lawsuit brought by a knavish neighbour, in the hope of extracting money out of me.

I am happy to say, however, that he has just been thoroughly and effectually defeated. It has been a new experience for me, and I hope it may be my last as well as my first acquaintance with English law, which is a luxury of the most expensive character.

If Dr. Kleinenberg is with you, please to tell him, with my compliments and thanks for the copy of his Memoir, that I went over his Hydra paper pretty carefully in the summer, and satisfied myself as to the correctness of his statements about the structure of the ectoderm and about the longitudinal fibres. About the Endoderm I am not so clear, and I often found indications of delicate circular fibres in close apposition with the longitudinal ones. However, I had not time to work all this out, and perhaps might as well say nothing about it.

Pray make my very kind remembrances to Mr. Grant. I trust that his dramas may have a brilliant reception.

The Happy Family flourishes. But we shall look to your coming to see us. The house is big enough now to give you a bedroom, and you know you will have no lack of welcome.

I have said nothing about my wife (who has been in a state not only of superhuman, but of superfeminine, activity for the last three months) meaning to leave her the last page to speak for herself.

With best compliments to the "ladies downstairs," ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

4 Marlborough Place, October 17, 1873.

My dear Dohrn,

Your letter reached me nearly a week ago, and I have been turning over its contents in my mind as well as I could, but have been able to come to no clear conclusion until now. I have been incessantly occupied with other things.

I will do for you, and gladly, anything I would do for myself, but I could not apply on my own behalf to any of those rich countrymen of mine, unless they were personally well known to me, and I had the opportunity of feeling my way with them. But if you are disposed to apply to any of the people you mention, I shall be only too glad to back your application with all the force I am master of. You may make use of my name to any extent as guarantor of the scientific value and importance of your undertaking and refer any one to whom you may apply to me. It may be, in fact, that this is all you want, but as you have taken to the caprice of writing in my tongue instead of in that vernacular, idiomatic and characteristically Dohrnian German in which I delight, I am not so sure about your meaning. There is a rub for you. If you write to me in English again I will send the letter back without paying the postage.

In any case let me have a precise statement of your financial position. I may have a chance of talking to some Croesus, and the first question he is sure to ask me is--How am I to know that this is a stable affair, and that I am not throwing my money into the sea?...

[Referring to an unpleasant step it seemed necessary to take]...you must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation...

I hope you are physically better. Look sharply after your diet, take exercise and defy the blue-devils, and you will weather the storm.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Tyndall, who had not attended the 1873 meeting of the British a.s.sociation, had heard that some local opposition had been offered to his election as President for the Belfast meeting in 1874, and had written:--

I wish to have an you had not persuaded me to accept that Belfast duty. They do not want me...but Spottiswoode a.s.sures me that no individual offered the slightest support to the two unscientific persons who showed opposition.

The following was written in reply:--]

4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1873.

My dear Tyndall,

I am sure you are mistaken about the Belfast people. That blundering idiot of -- wanted to make himself important and get up a sort of "Home Rule" agitation in the a.s.sociation, but n.o.body backed him and he collapsed. I am at your disposition for whatever you want me to do, as you know, and I am sure Hooker is of the same mind. We shall not be ashamed when we meet our enemies in the gate.

The grace of G.o.d cannot entirely have deserted you since you are aware of the temperature of that ferocious epistle. Reeks [The late Trenham Reeks, Registrar of the School of Mines, and Curator of the Museum of Practical Geology.], whom I saw yesterday, was luxuriating in it, and said (confound his impudence) that it was quite my style. I forgot to tell him, by the bye, that I had resigned in your favour ever since the famous letter to Carpenter. Well, so long as you are better after it there is no great harm done.

Somebody has sent me the two numbers of Scribner with Blauvelt's articles on "Modern Skepticism." They seem to be very well done, and he has a better appreciation of the toughness of the job before him than any of the writers of his school with whom I have met. But it is rather cool of you to talk of his pitching into Spencer when you are chief target yourself. I come in only par parenthese, and I am glad to see that people are beginning to understand my real position, and to separate me from such raging infidels as you and Spencer.

Ever thine,

T.H. Huxley.

[He was unable to attend the opening of Owens College this autumn, and having received but a scanty account of the proceedings, wrote as follows:--]

4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., October 16, 1873.

My dear Roscoe,

I consider myself badly used. n.o.body has sent me a Manchester paper with the proceedings of the day of inauguration, when, I hear, great speeches were made.

I DID get TWO papers containing your opening lecture, and the "Fragment of a Morality," for which I am duly grateful, but two copies of one days' proceedings are not the same thing as one copy of two days' proceedings, and I consider it is very disrespectful to a Governor (large G) not to let him know what went on.

By all accounts which have reached me it was a great success, and I congratulate you heartily. I only wish that I could have been there to see.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The autumn brought a slow improvement in health--]

I am travelling [he writes] between the two stations of dyspepsia and health thus [ill.u.s.trated by a zigzag with "mean line ascending".