Chapter 11

1878.

[The year 1878 was the tercentenary of Harvey's birth, and Huxley was very busy with the life and work of that great physician. He spoke at the memorial meeting at the College of Physicians (July 18), he gave a lecture on Harvey at the Royal Institution on January 25, afterwards published in "Nature" and the "Fortnightly Review," and intended to write a book on him in a projected "English Men of Science" series. (See below.)]

I am very glad you like "Harvey" [he writes to Professor Baynes on February 11]. He is one of the biggest scientific minds we have had. I expect to get well vilipended not only by the anti-vivisection folk, for the most of whom I have a hearty contempt, but apropos of Bacon. I have been oppressed by the humbug of the "Baconian Induction" all my life, and at last THE WORM HAS TURNED.

[Now in this lecture he showed that Harvey employed vivisection to establish the doctrine of the circulation of the blood, and furthermore, that he taught this doctrine before the "Novum Organum" was published, and that his subsequent "Exercitatio" displays no trace of being influenced by Bacon's work. After glancing at the superstitious reverence for the "Baconian Induction," he pointed out Bacon's ignorance of the progress of science up to his time, and his inability to divine the importance of what he knew by hearsay of the work of Copernicus, or Kepler, or Galileo; of Gilbert, his contemporary, or of Galen; and wound up by quoting Ellis's severe judgment of Bacon in the General Preface to the Philosophic Works, in Spedding's classical edition (page 38):--] "That his method is impracticable cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect, not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it."

[How early this conviction had forced itself upon him, I cannot say; but it was certainly not later than 1859, when the "Origin of Species" was constantly met with "Oh, but this is contrary to the Baconian method." He had long felt what he expresses most clearly in the "Progress of Science" ("Collected Essays" 1 46-57), that Bacon's] "majestic eloquence and fervid vaticinations," [which] "drew the attention of all the world to the 'new birth of Time,'" [were yet, for all practical results on discovery,] "a magnificent failure." [The desire for "fruits" has not been the great motive of the discoverer; nor has discovery waited upon collective research.] "Those who refuse to go beyond fact," [he writes,] "rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long-run."

[Thus he had been led to a settled disbelief in Bacon's scientific greatness, that reasoned "prejudice" against which Spedding himself was moved to write twice in defence of Bacon. In his first letter he criticised a passage in the lecture touching this question. On the one hand, he remarks, "Bacon would probably have agreed with you as to his pretensions as a scientific discoverer (he calls himself a bellman to call other wits together, or a trumpeter, or a maker of bricks for others to build with)." On the other hand, he asks, ought a passage from a fragment--the "Temporis partus masculus"--unpublished in Bacon's lifetime, to be treated as one of his representative opinions?

In his second letter he adduces, on other grounds, his own more favourable impression of Bacon's philosophical influence. A peculiar interest of this letter lies in its testimony to the influence of Huxley's writings even on his elder contemporaries.

From James Spedding.

February 1, 1878.

...When you admit that you study Bacon with a PREJUDICE, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion previously formed on sufficient grounds. Now I am myself supposed to have studied him with a prejudice the other way: but this I cannot admit, in any sense of the word; for when I first made his acquaintance I had no opinion or feeling about him at all--more than the ordinary expectation of a young man to find what he is told to look for. My earliest impression of his character came probably from Thomson--whose portrait of him, except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of "the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons," did not differ from the ordinary one. It was not long indeed before I did begin to form an opinion of my own; one of those AFTER-judgments which are liable to be mistaken for prejudices by those who judge differently, and which, being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the balance. For it was not long before I found myself indebted to him for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or dead, can confer on another. In my school and college days I had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in themes and declamations into the study, admiration, and imitation of the rhetoricians. In the course of my last long vacation--the autumn of 1830--I was inspired with a new ambition, namely, to think justly about everything which I thought about at all, and to act accordingly; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel grateful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of having in the beginning of that same vacation given two shillings at a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of Dove's classics, containing the Advancement of Learning. And if I could tell you how many superlatives I have since that time degraded into the positive; how many innumerables and infinities I have replaced by counted numbers and estimated quantities; how many assumptions, important to the argument in hand, I have withdrawn because I found on more consideration that the fact might be explained otherwise; and how many effective epithets I have discarded when I found that I could not fully verify them; you would think it no less than just that I should claim for myself and concede to others the right of being judged by the last edition rather than the first. That a persistent endeavour to free myself from what you regard as Bacon's characteristic vice should have been the fruit of a desire to follow his example, will seem strange to you, but it is fact. Perhaps you will think it not less strange, but it is my real belief, that if your own writings had been in existence and come in my way at the same critical stage of my moral and mental development, they would have taught me the same lesson and inspired me with the same ambition; for in that particular (if I may say it without offence) I look upon you BOTH as eminent examples of the SAME virtue.

To the lecture he refers once more in a letter to Mr. John Morley. The political situation touched on in this and the next letter is that of the end of the Russo-Turkish war and the beginning of the Afghan war.]

Science Schools, South Kensington, February 7, 1878.

My dear Morley,

Many thanks for the cheque, and still more for your good word for the article. [On Harvey.] I knew it would "draw" Hutton, and his ingenuity has as usual made the best of the possibilities of attack. I am glad to find, however, that he does not think it expedient to reiterate his old story about the valuelessness of vivisection in the establishment of the doctrine of the circulation.

I hear that that absurd creature R-- goes about declaring that I have made all sorts of blunders. Could not somebody be got to persuade him to put what he has to say in black and white?

Controversy is as abhorrent to me as gin to a reclaimed drunkard; but oh dear! it would be so nice to squelch that pompous imposter.

I hope you admire the late aspects of the British Lion. His tail goes up and down from the intercrural to the stiffly erect attitude per telegram, while his head is sunk in the windbag of the House of Commons.

I am beginning to think that a war would be a good thing if only for the inevitable clean sweep of all the present governing people which it would bring about.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[To his eldest daughter.]

Science Schools, South Kensington, December 7, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

You are a badly used young person--you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bete noire of whose existence is letter-writing.

Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper pot. No, not if I know it. Read Fitzjames Stephen's letter in the "Times," also Bartle Frere's memorandum, also Napier of Magdala's memo. Them's my sentiments.

Also read the speech of Lord Hartington on the address. He is a man of sense like his father, and you will observe that he declares that the Government were perfectly within their right in declaring war without calling Parliament together...

If you had lived as long as I have and seen as much of men, you would cease to be surprised at the reputations men of essentially commonplace powers--aided by circumstances and some amount of cleverness--obtain.

I am as strong for justice as any one can be, but it is real justice, not sham conventional justice which the sentimentalists howl for.

At this present time real justice requires that the power of England should be used to maintain order and introduce civilisation wherever that power extends.

The Afghans are a pack of disorderly treacherous blood-thirsty thieves and caterans who should never have been allowed to escape from the heavy hand we laid upon them, after the massacre of twenty thousand of our men, women, and children in the Khoord Cabul Pass thirty years ago.

We have let them be, and the consequence is they now lend themselves to the Russians, and are ready to stir up disorder and undo all the good we have been doing in India for the last generation.

They are to India exactly what the Highlanders of Scotland were to the Lowlanders before 1745; and we have just as much right to deal with them in the same way.

I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse to us. But so long as we make up our minds to hold it, we must also make up our minds to do those things which are needful to hold it effectually, and in the long run it will be found that so doing is real justice both for ourselves, our subject population, and the Afghans themselves.

There, you plague.

Ever your affectionate Daddy,

T.H. Huxley.

[A few days later he writes to his son:--]

The Liberals are making fools of themselves, and "the family" declare I am becoming a Jingo! another speech from Gladstone is expected to complete my conversion.

[Among other occupations he still had to attend the Scottish Universities Commission, for which he wrote the paragraph on examinations in its report; he lectured on the Hand at the Working Men's College; prepared new editions of the "Physiography," "Elementary Physiology," and "Vertebrate Anatomy," and at length brought out the "Introductory Primer" in the Science Primer Series, in quite a different form from what he had originally sketched out. But his chief interest lay in the Invertebrata. From April 29 to June 3 he lectured to working men at Jermyn Street upon the Crayfish; read a paper on the Classification and Distribution of Crayfishes at the Zoological Society on June 4, and lectured at the Zoological Gardens weekly from May 17 to June 21 on Crustaceous Animals. In all this work lay the foundations of his subsequent book on the Crayfish, which I find jotted down in the notes of this year to be written as an introduction to "Zoology," together with the "Dog" as an introduction to the "Mammalia", and "Man"--already dealt with in "Man's Place in Nature"--as an introduction to "Anthropology." This projected series is completed with a half-erased note of an introduction to "Psychology," which perhaps found some expression in parts of the "Hume," also written this year.

He notes down also, work on the Ascidians, and on the morphology of the Mollusca and Cephalopods brought back by the "Challenger," in connection with which he now began the monograph on the rare creature Spirula, a remarkable piece of work, being based upon the dissections of a single specimen, but destined never to be completed by his hand, though his drawings were actually engraved, and nothing remained but to put a few finishing touches and to write detailed descriptions of the plates.

Letters to W.K. Parker and Professor Haeckel touch on this part of his work; the former, indeed, offering a close parallel to a story, obviously of the same period, which the younger Parker tells in his reminiscences, to illustrate the way in which he would be utterly engrossed in a subject for the time being. Jeffery Parker, while demonstrator of biology, came to him with a question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in the investigation of some invertebrate group.] "Codfish?" [he replied,] "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll consider it."

4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1878.

My dear Parker,

As far as I recollect Ammocoetes is a vertebrated animal--and I ignore it.

The paper you refer to was written by my best friend--a carefulish kind of man--and I am as sure that he saw what he says he saw, as if I had seen it myself.

But what the fact may mean and whether it is temporary or permanent--is thy servant a dog that he should worry himself about other things with backbones? Not if I know it.

Churchill has got over a whole batch of the American edition of the Vertebrata, so I have a respite. Mollusks are far more interesting--bugs sweeter--while the dinner crayfish hath no parallel for intense and absorbing interest in the three kingdoms of Nature.

What saith the Scripture? "Go to the ANT thou sluggard." In other words, study the Invertebrata.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Sketch of a vast winged ant advancing on a midget, and saying, as it looks through a pair of eyeglasses, "Well, really, what an absurd creature!!"]

4 Marlborough Place, London, April 28, 1878.

My dear Haeckel,

Since the receipt of your letter three months ago, I have been making many inquiries about Medusae for you, but I could hear of none--and so I have delayed my reply, until I doubt not you have been blaspheming my apparent neglect.

My "Sammlung"!! [Collection.] My dear friend, my cabin on board H.M.S. "Rattlesnake" was 7 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 5 feet 6 inches high. When my bed and my clothes were in it, there was not much room for any collection, except the voluntary one made by some thousands of specimens of Blatta orientalis [The cockroach.], with whose presence I should have been very glad to dispense.

My Medusae were never published. I have heaps of notes and drawings and half-a-dozen engraved plates. But after the publication of the "Oceanic Hydrozoa" I was obliged to take to quite other occupations, and all that material is like the "full many a flower, born to blush unseen," of our poet.

If you would pay us a visit you should look through the whole mass, if you liked, and you might find something interesting.

At present, I am very busy about Crayfishes (Flusskrebse), working out the relations between their structure and their Geographical Distribution, which are very curious and interesting.

I have also nearly finished the anatomy of Spirula for the "Challenger." It is essentially a cuttlefish, and the shell is really internal. With only one specimen, it has been a long and troublesome job--but I shall establish all the essential points and give half-a-dozen plates of anatomy.

You will recollect my eldest little daughter? She is going to be married next Saturday. It is the first break in our family, and we are very sad to lose her--though well satisfied with her prospects. She is but just twenty and a charming girl, though you may put that down to fatherly partiality if you like.

The second daughter has taken to art, and will make a painter if she be wise enough not to marry for some years.

My eldest son who comes next is taller than I am. He has been at one of the Scotch Universities for the last six months; and one of these fine days, next month, you will see a fair-haired stripling asking for Herr Professor Haeckel.

I am going to send him to Jena for three months to pick up your noble vernacular; and in the meanwhile to continue his Greek and Mathematics, in which the young gentleman is fairly proficient. If you can recommend any Professor under whom he can carry on his studies, it will be a great kindness.

I will give him a letter to you, and while I beg you not to give yourself any trouble about him, I need not say I shall be very grateful for any notice you may take of him.

I am giving him as much independence of action as possible, in order that he may learn to take care of himself.

Now that is enough about my children. Yours must yet be young--and you have not yet got to the marriage and university stage--which I assure you is much more troublesome than the measles and chicken-pox period.

My wife unites with me in kindest remembrances and good wishes.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[An outbreak of diphtheria among his children made the spring of 1878 a time of overwhelming anxiety. How it told upon his strong and self-contained chief is related by T.J. Parker--"I never saw a man more crushed than he was during the dangerous illness of one of his daughters, and he told me that, having then to make an after-dinner speech, he broke down for the first time in his life, and for one painful moment forgot where he was and what he had to say." This was one of the few occasions of his absence from College during the seventies. "When, after two days, he looked in at the laboratory," writes Professor Howes, "his dejected countenance and tired expression betokened only too plainly the intense anxiety he had undergone."

The history of the outbreak was very instructive. Huxley took a leading part in organising an inquiry and in looking into the matter with the health officer.] "As soon as I can get all the facts together," [he writes on December 10,] "I am going to make a great turmoil about our outbreak of diphtheria--and see whether I cannot get our happy-go-lucky local government mended." [As usual, the epidemic was due to culpable negligence. In the construction of some drains, too small a pipe was laid down. The sewage could not escape, and flooded back in a low-lying part of Kilburn. Diphtheria soon broke out close by. While it was raging there, a St. John's Wood dairyman running short of milk, sent for more to an infected dairy in Kilburn. Every house which he supplied that day with Kilburn milk was attacked with diphtheria.

But with relief from this heavy strain, his spirits instantly revived, and he writes to Tyndall.]

4 Marlborough Place, May 20, 1878.

My dear Tyndall,

I wrote you a most downhearted letter this morning about Madge, and not without reason. But having been away four hours, I come home to find a wonderful and blessed change. The fever has abated and she is looking like herself. If she could only make herself heard, I should have some sauciness. I see it in her eyes.

If you will be so kind as to kiss everybody you meet on my account it will be a satisfaction to me. You may begin with Mrs. Tyndall!

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[Professor Marsh, with whom Huxley had stayed at Yale College in 1876, paid his promised visit to England immediately after this.]

4 Marlborough Place, N.W., June 24, 1878 (Evening).

My dear Marsh,

Welcome to England! I am delighted to hear of your arrival--but the news has only just reached me, as I have been away since Saturday with my wife and sick daughter who are at the seaside. A great deal has happened to us in the last six or seven weeks. My eldest daughter married, and then a week after an invasion of diphtheria, which struck down my eldest son, my youngest daughter, and my eldest remaining daughter altogether. Two of the cases were light, but my poor Madge suffered terribly, and for some ten days we were in sickening anxiety about her. She is slowly gaining strength now, and I hope there is no more cause for alarm--but my household is all to pieces--the Lares and Penates gone, and painters and disinfectors in their places.

You will certainly have to run down to Margate and see my wife--or never expect forgiveness in this world.

I shall be at the Science Schools, South Kensington, to-morrow till four--and if I do not see you before that time I shall come and look you up at the Palace Hotel.

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

"Is it not provoking," [he writes to his wife,] "that we should all be dislocated when I should have been so glad to show him a little attention?" [Still, apart from this weekend at the seaside, Professor Marsh was not entirely neglected. He writes in his "Recollections" (page 6):--

How kind Huxley was to everyone who could claim his friendship, I have good cause to know. Of the many instances which occur to me, one will suffice. One evening in London at a grand annual reception of the Royal Academy, where celebrities of every rank were present, Huxley said to me,] "When I was in America, you showed me every extinct animal that I had read about, or even dreamt of. Now, if there is a single living lion in all Great Britain that you wish to see, I will show him to you in five minutes." [He kept his promise, and before the reception was over, I had met many of the most noted men in England, and from that evening, I can date a large number of acquaintances, who have made my subsequent visits to that country an ever-increasing pleasure.

As for his summer occupations, he writes to his eldest daughter on July 2:--]

No, young woman, you don't catch me attending any congresses I can avoid, not even if F. is an artful committee-man. I must go to the British Association at Dublin--for my sins--and after that we have promised to pay a visit in Ireland to Sir Victor Brooke. After that I must settle myself down in Penmaenmawr and write a little book about David Hume--before the grindery of the winter begins.

[The meeting of the British Association took place this year in the third week of August at Dublin. Huxley gave an address in the Anthropological subsection ("Informal Remarks on the Conclusions of Anthropology" "British Association Report" 1878 pages 573-578.), and on the 20th received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Dublin University, the Public Orator presenting him in the following words:--

Praesento vobis Thomam Henricum Huxley--hominem vere physicum--hominem facundum, lepidum, venustum--eundem autem nihil (philosophia modo sua lucem praeferat) reformidantem--ne illud quidem Ennianum,

Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis.

The extract above given contains the first reference to the book on Hume (In the "English Men of Letters" series, edited by Mr. John Morley.), written this summer as a holiday occupation at Penmaenmawr. The speed at which it was composed is remarkable, even allowing for his close knowledge of the subject, acquired many years before. Though he had been "picking at it" earlier in the summer, the whole of the philosophical part was written during September, leaving the biographical part to be done later.

The following letters from Marlborough Place show him at work upon the book:--]

March 31, 1878.

My dear Morley,

I like the notion of undertaking your Hume book, and I don't see why I should not get it done this autumn. But you must not consider me pledged on that point, as I cannot quite command my time.

Tulloch sent me his book on Pascal. It was interesting as everything about Pascal must be, but Tulloch is not a model of style.

I have looked into Bruton's book, but I shall now get it and study it. Hume's correspondence with Rousseau seems to me typical of the man's sweet, easy-going nature. Do you mean to have a portrait of each of your men? I think it is a great comfort in a biography to get a notion of the subject in the flesh.

I have rather made it a rule not to part with my property in my books--but I daresay that can be arranged with Macmillan. Anyhow I shall be content to abide by the general arrangement if you have made one.

We have had a bad evening. Clifford has been here, and he is extremely ill--in fact I fear the worst for him. [See below.]

It is a thousand pities, for he has a fine nature all round, and time would have ripened him into something very considerable. We are all very fond of him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

July 6, 1878.

My dear Morley,

Very many thanks for Diderot. I have made a plunge into the first volume and found it very interesting. I wish you had put a portrait of him as a frontispiece. I have seen one--a wonderful face, something like Goethe's.

I am picking at Hume at odd times. It seems to me that I had better make an analysis and criticism of the "Inquiry," the backbone of the essay--as it touches all the problems which interest us most just now. I have already sketched out a chapter on Miracles, which will, I hope, be very edifying in consequence of its entire agreement with the orthodox arguments against Hume's a priori reasonings against miracles.

Hume wasn't half a sceptic after all. And so long as he got deep enough to worry Orthodoxy, he did not care to go to the bottom of things.

He failed to see the importance of suggestions already made both by Locke and Berkeley.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

September 30, 1878.

My dear Morley,

Praise me! I have been hard at work at Hume at Penmaenmawr, and I have got the hard part of the business--the account of his philosophy--blocked out in the bodily shape of about 180 pages foolscap manuscript.

But I find the job as tough as it is interesting. Hume's diamonds, before the public can see them properly, want a proper setting in a methodical and consistent shape--and that implies writing a small psychological treatise of one's own, and then cutting it down into as unobtrusive a form as possible.

So I am working away at my draft--from the point of view of an aesthetic jeweller.

As soon as I get it into such a condition as will need only verbal trimming, I should like to have it set up in type. For it is a defect of mine that I can never judge properly of any composition of my own in manuscript.

Moreover (don't swear at this wish) I should very much like to send it to you in that shape for criticism.

The Life will be an easy business. I should like to get the book out of hand before Christmas, and will do so if possible. But my lectures begin on Tuesday, and I cannot promise.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

October 21, 1878.

My dear Morley,

I have received slips up to chapter 9 of Hume, and so far I do not think (saving your critical presence) that there will be much need of much modification or interpolation.

I have made all my citations from a 4-volume edition of Hume, published by Black and Tait in 1826, which has long been in my possession.

Do you think I ought to quote Green and Grose's edition? It will be a great bother, and I really don't think that the understanding of Hume is improved by going back to eighteenth-century spelling.

I am at work upon the Life, which should not take long. But I wish that I had polished that off at Penmaenmawr as well. What with lecturing five days a week, and toiling at two anatomical monographs, it is hard to find time.

As soon as I have gone through all the eleven chapters about the Philosophy--I will send them to you and get you to come and dine some day--after you have looked at them--and go into it.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Science Schools, South Kensington, October 29, 1878.

My dear Morley,

Your letter has given me great pleasure. For though I have thoroughly enjoyed the work, and seemed to myself to have got at the heart of Hume's way of thinking, I could not tell how it would appear to others, still less could I pretend to judge of the literary form of what I had written. And as I was quite prepared to accept your judgment if it had been unfavourable, so being what it is, I hug myself proportionately and begin to give myself airs as a man of letters.

I am through all the interesting part of Hume's life--that is, the struggling part of it--and David the successful and the feted begins rather to bore me, as I am sorry to say most successful people do. I hope to send the first chapter to press in another week.

Might it not be better, by the way, to divide the little book into two parts?