Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 35

Your hearty letter is as good as a bottle of the best suns.h.i.+ne. Yes, I will lunch with you on Friday with pleasure, and Jess proposes to attend on the occasion...Her husband is in Gloucester, and so doesn't count. The absurd creature declares she must go back to him on Sat.u.r.day--stuff and sentiment. She has only been here six or seven weeks. There is nothing said in scripture about a wife cleaving to her husband!

With all our loves, ever yours very sincerely,

T.H. Huxley.

[The next is to his son, then at St. Andrews University, on winning a scholars.h.i.+p tenable at Oxford.]

South Kensington, April 21, 1879.

My dear Boy,

I was very glad to get your good news this morning, and I need not tell you whether M-- was pleased or not.

But the light of nature doth not inform us of the value and duration of the "Guthrie"--and from a low and material point of view I should like to be informed on that subject. However, this is "mere matter of detail" as the Irishman said when he was asked HOW he had killed his landlord. The pleasure to us is that you have made good use of your opportunities, and finished this first stage of your journey so creditably.

I am about to write to the Master of Balliol for advice as to your future proceedings. In the meanwhile, go in for the enjoyment of your holiday with a light heart. You have earned it.

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following, to Mrs. Clifford, was called forth by a hitch in respect to the grant to her of a Civil List pension after the death of her husband:--]

4 Marlborough Place, July 19, 1879.

My dear Lucy,

I am just off to Gloucester to fetch M-- back, and I shall have a long talk with that sage little woman over your letter.

In the meanwhile keep quiet and do nothing. I feel the force of what you say very strongly--so strongly, in fact, that I must morally ice myself and get my judgment clear and cool before I advise you what is to be done.

I am very sorry to hear you have been so ill. For the present dismiss the matter from your thoughts and give your mind to getting better.

Leave it all to be turned over in the mind of that cold-blooded, worldly, cynical old fellow, who signs himself,

Your affectionate Pater.

[The last is to Mr. Edward Clodd, on receiving his book "Jesus of Nazareth."]

4 Marlborough Place, Abbey Road, N.W., December 21, 1879.

My dear Mr. Clodd,

I have been spending all this Sunday afternoon over the book you have been kind enough to send me, and being a swift reader, I have travelled honestly from cover to cover.

It is the book I have been longing to see; in spirit, matter and form it appears to me to be exactly what people like myself have been wanting. For though for the last quarter of a century I have done all that lay in my power to oppose and destroy the idolatrous accretions of Judaism and Christianity, I have never had the slightest sympathy with those who, as the Germans say, would "throw the child away along with the bath"--and when I was a member of the London School Board I fought for the retention of the Bible, to the great scandal of some of my Liberal friends--who can't make out to this day whether I was a hypocrite, or simply a fool on that occasion.

But my meaning was that the ma.s.s of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them--not shut out from the perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilised mankind--not excluded from such a view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth as that which at last you have given us.

I cannot doubt that your work will have a great success not only in the grosser, but the better sense of the word.

I am yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The winter of 1879-80 was memorable for its prolonged spell of cold weather. One result of this may be traced in a New Year's letter from Huxley to his eldest daughter.] "I have had a capital holiday--mostly in bed--but I don't feel so grateful for it as I might do." [To be forced to avoid the many interruptions and distractions of his life in London, which claimed the greatest part of his time, he would regard as an unmixed blessing; as he once said feelingly to Professor Marsh,]

"If I could only break my leg, what a lot of scientific work I could do!" [But he was less grateful for having entire inaction forced upon him.

However, he was soon about again, and wrote as follows in answer to a letter from Sir Thomas (afterwards Lord) Farrer, which called his attention, as an old Fishery Commissioner, to a recent report on the sea-fisheries.]

4 Marlborough Place, January 9, 1880.

My dear Farrer,

I shall be delighted to take a dive into the unfathomable depths of official folly; but your promised doc.u.ment has not reached me.

Your astonishment at the tenacity of life of fallacies, permit me to say, is shockingly unphysiological. They, like other low organisms, are independent of brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are smitten on the place where the brains ought to be--I don't know B., but I am convinced that A. has nothing but a spinal cord, devoid of any cerebral development. Would Mr. Cross give him up for purposes of experiment? Lingen and you might perhaps be got to join in a memorial to that effect.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A fresh chapter of research, the results of which he now began to give to the public, was the history of the Dog. On April 6 and 13 he lectured at the Royal Inst.i.tution "On Dogs and the Problems connected with them"--their relation to other animals, and the problem of the origin of the domestic dog, and the dog-like animals in general. As so often before, these lectures were the outcome of the careful preparation of a course of instruction for his students. The dog had been selected as one of the types of mammalian structure upon which laboratory work was to be done. Huxley's own dissections had led him on to a complete survey of the genus, both wild and domestic. As he writes to Darwin on May 10:--]

I wish it were not such a long story that I could tell you all about the dogs. They will make out such a case for "Darwinismus" as never was. From the South American dogs at the bottom (C. vetulus, cancrivorus, etc.) to the wolves at the top, there is a regular gradual progression the range of variation of each "species"

overlapping the ranges of those below and above. Moreover, as to the domestic dogs, I think I can prove that the small dogs are modified jackals, and the big dogs ditto wolves. I have been getting capital material from India, and working the whole affair out on the basis of measurements of skulls and teeth.

However, my paper for the Zoological Society is finished, and I hope soon to send you a copy of it...

[Unfortunately he never found time to complete his work for final publication in book form, and the rough, unfinished notes are all that remain of his work, beyond two monographs "On the Epipubis in the Dog and Fox" ("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 30 162-63), and "On the Cranial and Dental Characters of the Canidae" ("Proceedings of the Zoological Society" 1880 pages 238-288).

The following letters deal with the collection of specimens for examination:--]

4 Marlborough Place, January 17, 1880.

My dear Flower,

I happened to get hold of two foxes this week--a fine dog fox and his vixen wife; and among other things, I have been looking up Cowper's glands, the supposed absence of which in the dogs has always "gone agin' me." Moreover, I have found them (or their representatives) in the shape of two small sacs, which open by conspicuous apertures into the urethra immediately behind the bulb. If your Icticyon was a male, I commend this point to your notice.

ITEM.

If you have not already begun to macerate him, do look for the "marsupial" fibro-cartilages, which I have mentioned in my "Manual,"

but the existence of which blasphemers have denied. I found them again at once in both Mr. and Mrs. Vulpes. You spot them immediately by the pectineus which is attached to them.

The dog-fox's caec.u.m is so different from the vixen's that Gray would have made distinct genera of them.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.