Chapter 17

Busk, an old friend of mine. All translation and article writing is weary work, and I never do it except for filthy lucre. Lecturing I do not like much better; though one way or another I have to give about sixty or seventy a year.

Now then, I think that is enough about my "Ich." You shall have a photographic image of him and my wife and child as soon as I can find time to have them done...

1 Eldon Place, Broadstairs, September 5, 1858.

My dear Hooker,

I am glad Mrs. Hooker has found rest for the sole of her foot. I returned her Tyndall's letter yesterday.

Wallace's impetus seems to have set Darwin going in earnest, and I am rejoiced to hear we shall learn his views in full, at last. I look forward to a great revolution being effected. Depend upon it, in natural history, as in everything else, when the English mind fully determines to work a thing out, it will do it better than any other.

I firmly believe in the advent of an English epoch in science and art, which will lick the Augustan (which, by the bye, had neither science nor art in our sense, but you know what I mean) into fits. So hooray, in the first place, for the Genera plantarum. I can quite understand the need of a new one, and I am right glad you have undertaken it. It seems to me to be in all respects the sort of work for you, and exactly adapted to your environment at Kew. I remember you mentioned to me some time ago that you were thinking of it.

I wish I could even hope that such a thing would be even attempted in the course of this generation for animals.

But with animal morphology in the state in which it is now, we have no terminology that will stand, and consequently concise and comparable definitions are in many cases impossible.

If old Dom. Gray [John Edward Gray (1800-1875) appointed Keeper of the Zoological Collections in the British Museum in 1840.) were but an intelligent activity instead of being a sort of zoological whirlwind, what a deal he might do. And I am hopeless of Owen's comprehending what classification means since the publication of the wonderful scheme which adorns the last edition of his lectures.

As you say, I have found this a great place for "work of price." I have finished the "Oceanic Hydrozoa" all but the bookwork, for which I must have access to the B. M. Library--but another week will do him. My notes are from eight to twelve years old, and really I often have felt like the editor of somebody else's posthumous work.

Just now I am busy over the "Croonian," which must be done before I return. I have been pulling at all the arguments as a spider does at his threads, and I think they are all strong. If so the thing will do some good.

I am perplexed about the N. H. Collections. The best thing, I firmly believe, would be for the Economic Zoology and a set of well selected types to go to Kensington, but I should be sorry to see the scientific collection placed under any such auspices as those which govern the "Bilers." I don't believe the clay soil of the Regent's Park would matter a fraction--and to have a grand scientific zoological and paleontological collection for working purposes close to the Gardens where the living beasts are, would be a grand thing. I should not wonder if the affair is greatly discussed at the B. A. at Leeds, and then, perhaps, light will arise.

Have you seen that madcap Tyndall's letter in the "Times?" He'll break his blessed neck some day, and that will be a great hole in the efficiency of my scientific young England. We mean to return next Saturday, and somewhere about the 16th of 17th I shall go down to York, where I want to study Plesiosaurs. I shall return after the British Association. The interesting question arises, Shall I have a row with the Great O. there? What a capital title that is they give him of the BRITISH Cuvier. He stands in exactly the same relation to the French as British brandy to cognac.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Am I to send the "Gardener's Chronicle" on, and where? please. I have mislaid the address.

Jermyn Street, October 25, 1858.

My dear Spencer,

I read your article on the "Archetype" the other day with great delight, particularly the phrase which puts the Owenian and Cummingian interpolations on the same footing. It is rayther strong, but quite just.

I do not remember a word to object to, but I think I could have strengthened your argument in one or two places. Having eaten the food, will you let me have back the dish? I am winding up the "Croonian," and want "L'Archetype" to refer to. So if you can let me have it I shall be obliged. When do you return?

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

14 Waverley Place, January 1, 1859.

My dearest Lizzie,

If intentions were only acts, the quantity of letter paper covered with my scrawl which you should have had by this time should have been something wonderful. But I live at high pressure, with always a number of things crying out to be done, and those that are nearest and call loudest get done, while the others, too often, don't. However, this day shall not go by without my wishing you all happiness in the new year, and that wish you know necessarily includes all belonging to you, and my love to them.

I have been long wanting to send you the photographs of myself, wife, and boy, but one reason or other (Nettie's incessant ill-health being, I am sorry to say, the chief) has incessantly delayed the procuring of the last. However, at length, we have obtained a tolerably successful one, though you must not suppose that Noel has the rather washed out look of his portrait. That comes of his fair hair and blue gray eyes--for the monkey is like his mother and has not an atom of resemblance to me.

He was two years old yesterday, and is the apple of his father's eye and chief deity of his mother's pantheon, which at present contains only a god and goddess. Another is expected shortly, however, so that there is no fear of Olympus looking empty.

...Here is the 26th of January and no letter gone yet...Since I began this letter I have been very busy with lectures and other sorts of work, and besides, my whole household almost has been ill--chicks with whooping cough, mother with influenza, a servant ditto. I don't know whether you have such things in Tennessee.

Let me see what has happened to me that will interest you since I last wrote. Did I tell you that I have finally made up my mind to stop in London--the Government having made it worth my while to continue in Jermyn Street? They give me 600 pounds sterling a year now, with a gradual rise up to 800 pounds sterling, which I reckon as just enough to live on if one keeps very quiet. However, it is the greatest possible blessing to be paid at last, and to be free from all the abominable anxieties which attend a fluctuating income. I can tell you I have had a sufficiently hard fight of it.

When Nettie and I were young fools we agreed we would marry whenever we had 200 pounds sterling a year. Well, we have had more than twice that to begin upon, and how it is we have kept out of the Bench is a mystery to me. But we HAVE, and I am inclined to think that the Missus has got a private hoard (out of the puddings) for Noel.

I shall leave Nettie to finish this rambling letter. In the meanwhile, my best love to you and yours, and mind you are a better correspondent than your affectionate brother,

Tom.

[To Professor Leuckart.]

The Government School of Mines, Jermyn Street, London, January 30, 1859.

My dear Sir,

Our mutual friend, Dr. Harley, informs me that you have expressed a wish to become possessed of a separate copy of my lectures, published in the "Medical Times." I greatly regret that I have not one to send you. The publisher only gave me half a dozen separate copies of the numbers of the journal in which the Lectures appeared. Of these I sent one to Johannes Muller and one to Professor Victor Carus, and the rest went to other friends.

I am sorry to say that a mere fragment of what I originally intended to have published has appeared, the series having been concluded when I reached the end of the Crustacea. To say truth, the Lectures were not fitted for the journal in which they appeared.

I did not know that anyone in Germany had noticed them until I received the copy of your "Bericht" for 1856, which you were kind enough to send me. I owe you many thanks for the manner in which you speak of them, and I assure you it was a source of great pleasure and encouragement to me to find so competent a judge as yourself appreciating and sympathising with my objects.

Particular branches of zoology have been cultivated in this country with great success, as you are well aware, but ten years ago I do not believe that there were half a dozen of my countrymen who had the slightest comprehension of morphology, and of what you and I should call "Wissenschaftliche Zoologie."

Those who thought about the matter at all took Owen's osteological extravaganzas for the ne plus ultra of morphological speculation.

I learned the meaning of Morphology and the value of development as the criterion of morphological views--first, from the study of the Hydrozoa during a long voyage, and secondly, from the writings of Von Baer. I have done my best, both by precept and practice, to inaugurate better methods and a better spirit than had long prevailed. Others have taken the same views, and I confidently hope that a new epoch for zoology is dawning among us. I do not claim for myself any great share in the good work, but I have not flinched when there was anything to be done.

Under these circumstances you will imagine that it was very pleasant to find on your side a recognition of what I was about.

I sent you, through the booksellers, some time ago a copy of my memoir on Aphis. I find from Moleschott's "Untersuchungen" that you must have been working at this subject contemporaneously with myself, and it was very satisfactory to find so close a concordance in essentials between our results. Your memoirs are extremely interesting, and to some extent anticipated results at which my friend, Mr. Lubbock [The present Sir John Lubbock, M.P.] (a very competent worker, with whose paper on Daphnia you are doubtless acquainted), had arrived.

I should be very glad to know what you think of my views of the composition of the articulate head.

I have been greatly interested also in your Memoir on Pentastomum. There can be no difficulty about getting a notice of it in our journals, and, indeed, I will see to it myself. Pray do me the favour to let me know whenever I can serve you in this or other ways.

I shall do myself the pleasure of forwarding to you immediately, through the booksellers, a lecture of mine on the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull, which is just published, and also a little paper on the development of the tail in fishes.

I am sorry to say that I have but little time for working at these matters now, as my position at the School of Mines obliges me to confine myself more and more to Paleontology.

However, I keep to the anatomical side of that sort of work, and so, now and then, I hope to emerge from amidst the fossils with a bit of recent anatomy.

Just at present, by the way, I am giving my disposable hours to the completion of a monograph on the Calycophoridae and Physophoridae observed during my voyage. The book ought to have been published eight years ago. But for three years I could get no money from the Government, and in the meanwhile you and Kolliker, Gegenbaur and Vogt, went to the shores of the Mediterranean and made sad havoc with my novelties. Then came occupations consequent on my appointment to the chair I now hold; and it was only last autumn that I had leisure to take up the subject again.

However, the plates, which I hope you will see in a few months have, with two exceptions, been engraved five years.

Pray make my remembrances to Dr. Eckhard. I was sorry not to have seen him again in London.

Ever, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours,

T.H. Huxley.

Professor Leuckart.

[At this time Sir J. Hooker was writing, as an introduction to his "Flora of Tasmania," his essay on the "Flora of Australia," published in 1859--a book which owed its form to the influence of Darwin, and in return lent weighty support to evolutionary theory from the botanical side. He sent his proofs for Huxley to read.

14 Waverley Place, N.W., April 22, 1859.

My dear Hooker,

I have read your proofs with a great deal of attention and interest. I was greatly struck with the suggestions in the first page, and the exposure of the fallacy "that cultivated forms recur to wild types if left alone" is new to me and seems of vast importance.

The argument brought forward in the note is very striking and as simple as the egg of Columbus, when one sees it. I have marked one or two passages which are not quite clear to me...

I have been accused of writing papers composed of nothing but heads of chapters, and I think you tend the same way. Please take the trouble to make the two lines I have scored into a paragraph, so that poor devils who are not quite so well up in the subject as yourself may not have to rack their brains for an hour to supply all the links of your chain of argument...

You see that I am in a carping humour, but the matter of the essays seems to me to be so very valuable that I am jealous of the manner of it.

I had a long visit from Greene of Cork yesterday. He is very Irish, but very intelligent and well-informed, and I am in hopes he will do good service. He is writing a little book on the Protozoa, which (so far as I have glanced over the proof sheets as yet) seems to show a very philosophical turn of mind. It is very satisfactory to find the ideas one has been fighting for beginning to take root.

I do not suppose my own personal contributions to science will ever be anything very grand, but I shall be well content if I have reason to believe that I have done something to stir up others.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[To the same:--]

April, 1859.

My dear Hooker,

...I pity you--as for the MSS. it is one of those cases for which penances were originally devised. What do you say to standing on your head in the garden for one hour per diem for the next week? It would be a relief...

I suppose you will be at the Phil. Club next Monday. In the meanwhile don't let all the flesh be worried off your bones (there isn't much as it is).

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

14 Waverley Place, July 29, 1859.

My dear Hooker,

I meant to have written to you yesterday, but things put it out of my head. If there is to be any fund raised at all, I am quite of your mind that it should be a scientific fund and not a mere naturalists' fund. Sectarianism in such matters is ridiculous, and besides that, in this particular case it is bad policy. For the word "Naturalist" unfortunately includes a far lower order of men than chemist, physicist, or mathematician. You don't call a man a mathematician because he has spent his life in getting as far as quadratics; but every fool who can make bad species and worse genera is a "Naturalist"!--save the mark! Imagine the chemists petitioning the Crown for a Pension for P-- if he wanted one! and yet he really is a philosopher compared to poor dear A--.

"Naturalists" therefore are far more likely to want help than any other class of scientific men, and they would be greatly damaging their own interests if they formed an exclusive fund for themselves.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.