Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 37

[Tyndall replied with no less frankness, thanking him for the friendly prompt.i.tude of his letter, and explaining that he had meant to speak privately on the matter, but had been forestalled by the subject coming up when it did. And he wound up by declaring that it would be too absurd to admit the power of such an occasion "to put even a momentary strain upon the cable which has held us together for nine and twenty years."

At the very end of the year, George Eliot died. A proposal was immediately set on foot to inter her remains in Westminster Abbey, and various men of letters pressed the matter on the Dean, who was unwilling to stir without a very strong and general expression of opinion. To Mr. Herbert Spencer, who had urged him to join in memorialising the Dean, Huxley replied as follows:--]

4 Marlborough Place, December 27, 1880.

My dear Spencer,

Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking with Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired nothing so much as that peace and honour should attend George Eliot to her grave.

It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less provocation), with the raking up of past histories, about which the opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.

With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently a.s.sailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right thing for a man in his position to do.

Now I cannot say I do. However much I may lament the circ.u.mstance, Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to bestow exceptional Christian honours by this burial in the Abbey.

George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition in which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should most emphatically refuse to do?

You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning to be near even in death to those whom we have loved. And on public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One cannot eat one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.

Thus, however I look at the proposal it seems to me to be a profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it.

I shall be deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives than those which I have set forth at more length than I intended.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

CHAPTER 2.12.

1881.

[The last ten years had found Huxley gradually involved more and more in official duties. Now, with the beginning of 1881, he became yet more deeply engrossed in practical and administrative work, more completely cut off from his favourite investigations, by his appointment to an Inspectors.h.i.+p of Fisheries, in succession to the late Frank Buckland. It is almost pathetic to note how he s.n.a.t.c.hed at any spare moments for biological research. No sooner was a long afternoon's work at the Home Office done, than, as Professor Howes relates, he would often take a hansom to the laboratory at South Kensington, and spend a last half-hour at his dissections before going home.

The Inspectors.h.i.+p, which was worth 700 pounds a year, he held in addition to his post at South Kensington, the official description of which now underwent another change. In the first place, his official connection with the Survey appears to have ceased this year, the last report made by him being in 1881. His name, however, still appeared in connection with the post of Naturalist until his retirement in 1885, and it was understood that his services continued to be available if required. Next, in October of this year, the Royal School of Mines was incorporated with the newly established Normal School--or as it was called in 1890, Royal College of Science, and the t.i.tle of Lecturer on General Natural History was suppressed, and Huxley became Professor of Biology and Dean of the College at a salary of 800 pounds, for it was arranged on his appointment to the Inspectors.h.i.+p, that he should not receive the salary attached to the post of Dean. Thus the Treasury saved 200 pounds a year.

As Professor of Biology, he was under the Lord President of the Council; as Inspector of Fisheries, under the Board of Trade; hence some time pa.s.sed in arranging the claims of the two departments before the appointment was officially made known, as may be gathered from the following letters:--]

To Sir John Donnelly.

4 Marlborough Place, December 27, 1880.

My dear Donnelly,

I tried hard to have a bad cold last night, and though I blocked him with quinine, I think I may as well give myself the benefit of the Bank Holiday and keep the house to-day.

There is a chance of your getting early salmon yet. I wrote to decline the post on Friday, but on Sat.u.r.day evening the Home Secretary sent a note asking to see me yesterday. As he had re-opened the question, of course I felt justified in stating all the pros and cons of the case as personal to myself and my rather complicated official position...He entered into the affair with a warmth and readiness which very agreeably surprised me, and he proposes making such arrangements as will not oblige me to have anything to do with the weirs or the actual inspection. Under these circ.u.mstances the post would be lovely--if I can hold it along with the other things. And of his own motion the Home Secretary is going to write to Lord Spencer about it to see if he cannot carry the whole thing through.

If this could be managed, I could get great things done in the matter of fish culture and fish diseases at South Kensington, if poor dear X.'s rattle trappery could be turned to proper account, without in any way interfering with the work of the School.

At any rate, my book stands not to lose, and may win--the innocence of the dove is not always divorced from the wisdom of the sarpent.

[Sketch of the "Sarpent."]

To Lord Farrer.

4 Marlborough Place, January 18, 1881.

My dear Farrer,

I have waited a day or two before thanking you for your very kind letter, in the hope that I might be able to speak as one knowing where he is.

But as I am still, in an official sense, nowhere, I will not delay any longer.

I had never thought of the post, but the Home Secretary offered it to me in a very kind and considerate manner, and after some hesitation I accepted it. But some adjustment had to be made between my master, the Lord President, and the Treasury; and although everybody seems disposed to be very good to me, the business is not yet finally settled. Whence the newspapers get their information I don't know--but it is always wrong in these matters.

As you know, I have had a good apprentices.h.i.+p to the work [He had already served on two Fishery Committees, 1862 and 1864-5.]--and I hope to be of some use; of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life--the jamming common-sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

May we do some joint business in that way!

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

To his eldest son.

February 14, 1881.

I have entered upon my new duties as Fishery Inspector, but you are not to expect salmon to be much cheaper just yet.

My colleague and I have rooms at the Home Office, and I find there is more occupation than I expected, but no serious labour.

Every now and then I shall have to spend a few days in the country, holding inquiries, and as salmon rivers are all in picturesque parts of the country, I shall not object to that part of the business.

[The duties of the new office were partly scientific, partly administrative. On the one hand, the natural history and diseases of fish had to be investigated; on the other, regulations had to be carried out, weirs and salmon pa.s.ses approved, disputes settled, reports written. I find, for instance, that apart from the work in London, visits of inspection in all parts of the country took up twenty-eight days between March and September this year.

Sir Spencer Walpole, who was his colleague for some years, has kindly given me an account of their work together.

Early in 1881, Sir William Harcourt appointed Professor Huxley one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Fisheries. The office had become vacant through the untimely death, in the preceding December, of the late Mr.

Frank Buckland. Under an Act, pa.s.sed twenty years before, the charge of the English Salmon Fisheries had been placed under the Home Office, and the Secretary of State had been authorised to appoint two Inspectors to aid him in administering the law. The functions of the Home Office and of the Inspectors were originally simple, but they had been enlarged by an Act pa.s.sed in 1873, which conferred on local conservators elaborate powers of making bye-laws for the development and preservation of the Fisheries. These bye-laws required the approval of the Secretary of State, who was necessarily dependent on the advice of his Inspectors in either allowing or disallowing them.

In addition to the nominal duties of the Inspectors, they became--by virtue of their position--the advisers of the Government on all questions connected with the Sea Fisheries of Great Britain. These fisheries are nominally under the Board of Trade, but, as this Board at that time had no machinery at its disposal for the purpose, it naturally relied on the advice of the Home Office Inspectors in all questions of difficulty, on which their experience enabled them to speak with authority.

For duties such as these, which have been thus briefly described, Professor Huxley had obvious qualifications. On all subjects relating to the Natural History of Fish he spoke with decisive authority. But, in addition to his scientific attainments, from 1863 to 1865 he had been a member of the Commission which had conducted an elaborate investigation into the condition of the Fisheries of the United Kingdom, and had taken a large share in the preparation of a Report, which--notwithstanding recent changes in law and policy--remains the ablest and most exhaustive doctrine which has ever been laid before Parliament on the subject.

This protracted investigation had convinced Professor Huxley that the supply of fish in the deep sea was practically inexhaustible; and that, however much it might be necessary to enforce the police of the seas by protecting particular cla.s.ses of sea fishermen from injury done to their instruments by the operations of other cla.s.ses, the primary duty of the legislature was to develop sea fis.h.i.+ng, and not to place restrictions on sea fishermen for any fears of an exhaustion of fish.

His scientific training, moreover, made him ridicule the modern notion that it was possible to stock the sea by artificial methods. He wrote to me, when the Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 was in contemplation,]

"You may have seen that we have a new Fish Culture Society. C-- talked gravely about our stocking the North Sea with cod! After that I suppose we shall take up herrings: and I mean to propose whales, which, as all the world knows, are terribly over fished!" [And after the exhibition was over he wrote to me again, with reference to a report which the Commission had asked me to draw up: ["I have just finished reading your report, which has given me a world of satisfaction...I am particularly glad that you have put in a word of warning to the fish culturists." [When I was asked to write the report on this Commission, I said that I would do so if Sir E. Birkbeck, its chairman, and Professor Huxley, both met me to discuss the points to be noticed. The meeting duly took place: and I opened it by asking what was the chief lesson to be drawn from the exhibition?] "Well,"

[said Professor Huxley,] "the chief lesson to be drawn from the exhibition is that London is in want of some open air amus.e.m.e.nt on summer evenings."