Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1

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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.

CHAPTER 1.13.

1859.

[In November 1859 the "Origin of Species" was published, and a new
direction was given to Huxley's activities. Ever since Darwin and
Wallace had made their joint communication to the Linnean Society in the
preceding July, expectation had been rife as to the forthcoming book.
Huxley was one of the few privileged to learn Darwin's argument before
it was given to the world; but the greatness of the book, mere
instalment as it was of the long accumulated mass of notes, almost took
him by surprise. Before this time, he had taken up a thoroughly agnostic
attitude with regard to the species question, for he could not accept
the creational theory, yet sought in vain among the transmutationists
for any cause adequate to produce transmutation. He had had many talks
with Darwin, and though ready enough to accept the main point,
maintained such a critical attitude on many others, that Darwin was not
by any means certain of the effect the published book would produce upon
him. Indeed, in his 1857 notebook, I find jotted down under the head of
his paper on Pygocephalus (read at the Geological Society),]
"anti-progressive confession of faith." [Darwin was the more anxious,
as, when he first put pen to paper, he had fixed in his mind three
judges, by whose decision he determined mentally to abide. These three
were Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley. If these three came round, partly
through the book, partly through their own reflections, he could feel
that the subject was safe. "No one," writes Darwin on November 13, "has
read it, except Lyell, with whom I have had much correspondence. Hooker
thinks him a complete convert, but he does not seem so in his letters to
me; but is evidently deeply interested in the subject." And again: "I
think I told you before that Hooker is a complete convert. If I can
convert Huxley I shall be content." ("Life" volume 2 page 221.)

On all three, the effect of the book itself, with its detailed arguments
and overwhelming array of evidence, was far greater than that of
previous discussions. With one or two reservations as to the logical
completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded working
hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise inexplicable.

Two extracts from the chapter he contributed to the "Life of Darwin"
show very clearly his attitude of mind when the "Origin of Species" was
first published:--]

Extract from "The Reception of the 'Origin of Species'" in "Life and
Letters of Charles Darwin" volume 2 pages 187-90 and 195-97.

I think I must have read the "Vestiges" before I left England in 1846;
but, if I did, the book made very little impression upon me, and I was
not brought into serious contact with the "Species" question until after
1850. At that time, I had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony,
which had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth,
with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had
cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbiassed in
respect of any doctrine which presented itself, if it professed to be
based on purely philosophical and scientific reasoning. It seemed to me
then (as it does now) that "creation," in the ordinary sense of the
word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that,
at some former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it
made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is
preferred), in consequence of the volition of some pre-existing Being.
Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism; and,
given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me
to be devoid of reasonable foundation. I had not then, and I have not
now, the smallest a priori objection to raise to the account of the
creation of animals and plants given in "Paradise Lost," in which Milton
so vividly embodies the natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to
say that it is untrue because it is impossible. I confine myself to what
must be regarded as a modest and reasonable request for some particle of
evidence that the existing species of animals and plants did originate
in that way, as a condition of my belief in a statement which appears to
me to be highly improbable.

And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to
give to the evolutionists of 1851-8. Within the ranks of the biologists,
at that time, I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant of University College,
who had a word to say for Evolution--and his advocacy was not calculated
to advance the cause. Outside these ranks, the only person known to me
whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was, at the same
time, a thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose
acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds
of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no interruption.
Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my
friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could
not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two
grounds:--Firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favour of
transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion
respecting the causes of transmutation assumed, which had been made, was
in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state
of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion
was justifiable.

In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' "Biologie." However,
I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the "Vestiges" with due
care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my
negative and critical attitude. As for the "Vestiges," I confess that
the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly
unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any
influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review
I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless
savagery, is one I wrote on the "Vestiges" while under that influence...

But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put
as little faith in modern speculations on this subject as in the
venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was
perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious
conviction that Evolution, after all, would turn out true. I have
recently read afresh the first edition of the "Principles of Geology";
and when I consider that this remarkable book had been nearly thirty
years in everybody's hands, and that it brings home to any reader of
ordinary intelligence a great principle and a great fact,--the principle
that the past must be explained by the present, unless good cause be
shown to the contrary; and the fact that so far as our knowledge of the
past history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be shown--I
cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for myself, was the chief
agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism
postulates Evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world.
The origin of a new species by other than ordinary agencies would be a
vastly greater "catastrophe" than any of those which Lyell successfully
eliminated from sober geological speculation.

Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that my own position of
critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and must have been taken
up, on the same grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told me that
the forms of life which have successively tenanted the globe were the
incarnations of successive thoughts of the Deity; and that he had wiped
out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe
as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself not only
unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the facts of
paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I
had to confess my want of any means of testing the correctness of his
explanation of them. And besides that, I could by no means see what the
explanation explained. Neither did it help me to be told by an eminent
anatomist that species had succeeded one another in time, in virtue of
"a continuously operative creational law." That seemed to me to be no
more than saying that species had succeeded one another in the form of a
vote-catching resolution, with "law" to catch the man of science, and
"creational" to draw the orthodox. So I took refuge in that "thatige
Skepsis" which Goethe has so well defined; and, reversing the apostolic
precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability
of the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmutationist;
and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the
orthodox--thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite
undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.

I remember, in the course of my first interview with Mr. Darwin,
expressing my belief in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation
between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms, with
all the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge. I was not aware, at
that time, that he had then been many years brooding over the
species-question; and the humorous smile which accompanied his gentle
answer, that such was not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled
me. But it would seem that four or five years' hard work had enabled me
to understand what it meant; for Lyell, writing to Sir Charles Bunbury
(under date of April 30, 1856), says:--

"When Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were at Darwin's last week they (all
four of them) ran a tilt against species--further, I believe, than they
are prepared to go."

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