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

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But having satisfied one's love of freedom in this way, perhaps the
sooner the war-paint is off the better. It has no virtue except as a
sign of one's own frame of mind and determination, and when that is once
known, is little better than a distraction.

I think there are a few patches of this kind, my dear friend, which may
as well come out in the next edition, e.g. that wonderful note about the
relation of God to gas, the gravity of which greatly tickled my fancy.

I pictured to myself the effect which a translation of this would have
upon the minds of my respectable countrymen!

Apropos of translation. Darwin wrote to me on that subject, and with his
usual generosity, would have made a considerable contribution towards
the expense if we could have seen our way to the publication of a
translation. But I do not think it would be well to translate the book
in fragments, and, as a whole, it would be a very costly undertaking,
with very little chance of finding readers.

I do not believe that in the British Islands there are fifty people who
are competent to read the book, and of the fifty, five and twenty have
read it or will read it in German.

What I desire to do is to write a review of it, which will bring it into
some notice on this side of the water, and this I hope to do before
long. If I do not it will be, you well know, from no want of
inclination, but simply from lack of time.

In any case, as soon as I have been able to study the book carefully,
you shall have my honest opinion about all points.

I am glad your journey has yielded so good a scientific harvest, and
especially that you found my "Oceanic Hydrozoa" of some use. But I am
shocked to find that you had no copy of the book of your own, and I
shall take care that one is sent to you. It is my first-born work, done
when I was very raw and inexperienced, and had neither friends nor help.
Perhaps I am all the fonder of the child on that ground.

A lively memory of you remains in my house, and wife and children will
be very glad to hear that I have news of you when I go home to dinner.

Keep us in kindly recollection, and believe me,

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

July 16, 1867.

My dear Haeckel,

My wife and I send you our most hearty congratulations and good wishes.
Give your betrothed a good account of us, and for we hope in the future
to entertain as warm a friendship for her as for you. I was very glad to
have the news, for it seemed to me very sad that a man of your warm
affections should be surrounded only by hopeless regrets. Such
surroundings inflict a sort of partial paralysis upon one's whole
nature, a result which is, to me, far more serious and regrettable than
the mere suffering one undergoes.

The one thing for men, who like you and I stand pretty much alone, and
have a good deal of fighting to do in the external world, is to have
light and warmth and confidence within the four walls of home. May all
these good things await you!

Many thanks for your kind invitation to Jena. I am sure my wife would be
as much pleased as I to accept it, but it is very difficult for her to
leave her children.

We will keep it before us as a pleasant possibility, but I suspect you
and Madame will be able to come to England before we shall reach
Germany.

I wish I had rooms to offer you, but you have seen that troop of
children and they leave no corner unoccupied.

Many thanks for the Bericht and the genealogical tables. You seem, as
usual, to have got through an immense amount of work.

I have been exceedingly occupied with a paper on the "Classification of
Birds," a sort of expansion of one of my Hunterian Lectures this year.
It has now gone to press, and I hope soon to be able to send you a copy
of it.

Occupation of this and other kinds must be my excuse for having allowed
so much longer a time to slip by than I imagined had done before writing
to you. It is not for want of sympathy, be sure, for my wife and I have
often talked of the new life opening out to you.

This is written in my best hand. I am proud of it, as I can read every
word quite easily myself, which is more than I can always say for my own
MS.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The same experience is attested and enforced in the correspondence with
Dr. Anton Dohrn, which begins this year. Genial, enthusiastic, as
pungent as he was eager in conversation, the future founder of the
Marine Biological Station at Naples, on his first visit to England, made
my father's acquaintance by accepting his invitation to stay with him]
"for as long as you can make it convenient to stay" [at Swanage,] "a
little country town with no sort of amusement except what is to be got
by walking about a rather pretty country. But having warned you of this,
I repeat that it will give me much pleasure to see you if you think it
worthwhile to come so far."

[Dr. Dohrn came, and came into the midst of the family--seven children,
ranging from ten years to babyhood, with whom he made himself as popular
by his farmyard repertory, as he did with the elders by other qualities.
The impression left upon him appears from a letter written soon after:--

"Ich habe heute mehrere Capitel in Mill's 'Utilitarianism' gelesen and
das Wort happiness mehr als einmal gefunden: hatte ich eine Definition
dieses vielumworbenen Wortes irgend Jemand zu geben, ich wurde sagen (I
have been reading several chapters of Mill's 'Utilitarianism' to-day,
and met with the word 'happiness' more than once; if _I_ had to give
anybody a definition of this much debated word, in other say): go and
see the Huxley family at Swanage; and if you would enjoy the same I
enjoyed, you would feel what is happiness, and never more ask for a
definition of this sentiment."]

Swanage, September 22, 1867.

My dear Dohrn,

Thanks to my acquaintance with the "Microskopische Anatomie," and to the
fact that you employ our manuscript characters, and not the
hieroglyphics of what I venture to call the "cursed" and not "cursiv"
Schrift, your letter was as easy as it was pleasant to read. We are all
glad to have news of you, though it was really very unnecessary to thank
us for trying to make your brief visit a pleasant one. Your conscience
must be more "pungent" than your talk, if it pricks you with so little
cause. My wife rejoices saucily to find that phrase of hers has stuck so
strongly in your mind, but you must remember her fondness for "Tusch."

You must certainly marry. In my bachelor days, it was unsafe for anyone
to approach me before mid-day, and for all intellectual purposes I was
barren till the evening. Breakfast at six would have upset me for the
day. You and the lobster noted the difference the other day.

Whether it is matrimony or whether it is middle age I don't know, but as
time goes on you can combine both.

I cannot but accept your kind offer to send me Fanny Lewald's works,
though it is a shame to rob you of them. In return my wife insists on
your studying a copy of Tennyson, which we shall send you as soon as we
return to civilisation, which will be next Friday. If you are in London
after that date we shall hope to see you once more before you return to
the bosom of the "Fatherland."

I did my best to give the children your message, but I fear I failed
ignominiously in giving the proper bovine vocalisation to "Mroo."

That small curly-headed boy Harry, struck, I suppose by the kindness you
both show to children, has effected a synthesis between you and Tyndall,
and gravely observed the other day, "Doctor Dohrn-Tyndall do say Mroo."

My wife...Sends her kind regards. The "seven" are not here or they would
vote love by acclamation.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[He did not this year attend the British Association, which was held in
Dundee. This was the first occasion on which an evening was devoted to a
working men's lecture, a step important as tending towards his own ideal
of what science should be:--not the province of a few, but the
possession of the many.

This first lecture was delivered by Professor Tyndall, who wrote him an
account of the meeting, and in particular of his reconciliation with
Professors Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Tait, with whom he had had a
somewhat embittered controversy.

In his reply, Huxley writes:--]

To J. Tyndall.

Thanks also for a copy of the "Dundee Advertiser" containing your
lecture. It seemed to me that the report must be a very good one, and
the lecture reads exceedingly well. You have inaugurated the working
men's lectures of the Association in a way that cannot be improved. And
it was worth the trouble, for I suspect they will become a great and
noble feature in the meetings.

Everything seems to have gone well at the meeting, the educational
business carried [i.e. a recommendation that natural science be made a
part of the curriculum in the public schools], and the anthropologers
making fools of themselves in a most effectual way. So that I do not
feel that I have anything to reproach myself with for being absent.

I am very pleased to hear of the reconciliation with Thomson and Tait.
The mode of it speaks well for them, and the fact will remove a certain
source of friction from amongst the cogs of your mental machinery.

[The following gives the reason for his resigning the Fullerian
lectureship:--]

Athenaeum Club, May, 1867.

My dear Tyndall,

A conversation I had with Bence Jones yesterday reminded me that I ought
to have communicated with you. But we do not meet so often as we used to
do, being, I suppose, both very busy, and I forget to write.

You recollect that the last time we talked together, you mentioned a
notion of Bence Jones's to make the Fullerian Professorship of
Physiology a practically permanent appointment, and that I was quite
inclined to stick by that (if such arrangement could be carried out),
and give up other things.

But since I have been engaged in the present course of lectures I have
found reason to change my views. It is very hard work, and takes up
every atom of my time to make the lectures what they should be; and I
find that at this time of year, being more or less used up, I suppose,
with the winter work, I stand the worry and excitement of the actual
lectures very badly. Add to this that it is six weeks clean gone out of
the only time I have disposable for real scientific progress, and you
will understand how it is that I have made up my mind to resign.

I put all this clearly before Bence Jones yesterday, with the proviso
that I could and would do nothing that should embarrass the Institution
or himself.

If there is the least difficulty in supplying my place, or if the
managers think I shall deal shadily with them by resigning before the
expiration of my term, of course I go on. And I hope you all understand
that I would do anything rather than put even the appearance of a slight
upon those who were kind enough to elect me.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[He found a substitute for 1868, the last year of the triennial course,
in Dr. (now Sir) Michael Foster. Of his final lectures in 1867 he used
to tell a story against himself.]

In my early period as a lecturer, I had very little confidence in my
general powers, but one thing I prided myself upon was clearness. I was
once talking of the brain before a large mixed audience, and soon began
to feel that no one in the room understood me. Finally I saw the
thoroughly interested face of a woman auditor, and took consolation in
delivering the remainder of the lecture directly to her. At the close,
my feeling as to her interest was confirmed when she came up and asked
if she might put one question upon a single point which she had not
quite understood. "Certainly," I replied. "Now, Professor," she said,
"is the cerebellum inside or outside the skull?" ("Reminiscences of T.H.
Huxley" by Professor H. Fairfield Osborn).

[Dr. Foster used to add maliciously, that disgust at the small
impression he seemed to have made was the true reason for the
transference of the lectures.]

CHAPTER 1.22.

1868.

[In 1868 he published five scientific memoirs, amongst them his
classification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica"
("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This
creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from
which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years'
labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a
lecture at the Royal Institution, on February 7, "On the Animals which
are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles."

Of this branch of work Sir M. Foster says: (Obituary Notice "Proceedings
of the Royal Society" volume 59):--

One great consequence of these researches was that science was enriched
by a clear demonstration of the many and close affinities between
reptiles and birds, so that the two henceforward came to be known under
the joint title of Sauropsida, the amphibia being at the same time
distinctly more separated from the reptiles, and their relations to
fishes more clearly signified by the joint title of Ichthyopsida. At the
same time, proof was brought forward that the line of descent of the
Sauropsida clearly diverged from that of the Mammalia, both starting
from some common ancestry. And besides this great generalisation, the
importance of which, both from a classificatory and from an evolutional
point of view, needs no comment, there came out of the same researches
numerous lesser contributions to the advancement of morphological
knowledge, including among others an attempt, in many respects
successful, at a classification of birds.

This work in connection with the reptilian ancestry of birds further
appears in the paleontological papers published in 1869 upon the
Dinosaurs (see Chapter 23), and is referred to in a letter to Haeckel.

His Hunterian lectures on the Invertebrata appeared this year in the
"Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science" (pages 126-129, and
191-201), and in the October number of the same journal appeared his
famous article "On some Organisms living at great depth in the North
Atlantic Ocean," originally delivered before the British Association at
Norwich in this year (1868). The sticky or viscid character of the fresh
mud from the bottom of the Atlantic had already been noticed by Captain
Dayman when making soundings for the Atlantic cable. This stickiness was
apparently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent,
gelatinous substance, consisting of minute granules without discoverable
nucleus or membranous envelope, and interspersed with cretaceous
coccoliths. After a description of the structure of this substance and
its chemical reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding
the statement of fact in the description and the interpretation which he
proceeds to put upon these facts:--]

I conceive that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous
matter in which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take
away the cysts which characterise the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoum
would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Ur-schleim," which
must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings
which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his
"Monographie der Moneras" page 210. [(See "Collected Essays" 5 153.)

Of this he writes to Haeckel on October 6, 1868:--]

This paper] is about a new "Moner" which lies at the bottom of the
Atlantic to all appearances, and gives rise to some wonderful calcified
bodies. I have christened it Bathybius Haeckelii, and I hope that you
will not be ashamed of your god-child. I will send you some of the mud
with the paper.

[The explanation was plausible enough on general grounds, if the
evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But it must be noted that
the specimens examined by him and by Haeckel, who two years later
published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen in a
preserved state. Neither of them saw a fresh specimen, though on the
cruise of the "Porcupine," Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W. Carpenter
examined the substance in a fresh state, and found no better explanation
to give of it. However, not only were the expectations that it was very
widely distributed over the Atlantic bottom, falsified in 1879 by the
researches of the "Challenger" expedition, but the behaviour of certain
deep-sea specimens gave good ground for suspecting that what had been
sent home before as genuine deep-sea mud, was a precipitate due to the
action on the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved.
Though Haeckel, with his special experience of Monera, refused to desert
Bathybius, a close parallel to which was found off Greenland in 1876,
the rest of its sponsors gave it up. Whatever it might be as a matter of
possibility, the particular evidence upon which it had been described
was tainted. Once assured of this, Huxley characteristically took the
bull by the horns. Without waiting for any one else to come forward, he
made public renunciation of Bathybius at the British Association in
1879. The "eating of the leek" as recommended to his friend Dohrn (July
7, 1868), was not merely a counsel for others, but was a prescription
followed by himself on occasion:--]

As you know, I did not think you were on the right track with the
Arthropoda, and I am not going to profess to be sorry that you have
finally worked yourself to that conclusion.

As to the unlucky publication in the "Journal of Anatomy and
Physiology," you have read your Shakespeare and know what is meant by
"eating a leek." Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and
I assure you that if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of
that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly
in people of sanguine temperament.

Seriously you must not mind a check of this kind.

[This incident, one may suspect, was in his mind when he wrote in his
"Autobiography" of the rapidity of thought characteristic of his
mother:--]

That characteristic has been passed on to me in full strength; it has
often stood me in good stead, it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and
it has always been a danger.

[At the Norwich meeting of the Association he also delivered his
well-known lecture to working men "On a Piece of Chalk," a perfect
example of the handling of a common and trivial subject, so as to make
it] "a window into the Infinite." [He was particularly interested in the
success of the meeting, as his friend Hooker was President, and writes
to Darwin, September 12:--]

We had a capital meeting at Norwich, and dear old Hooker came out in
great force as he always does in emergencies.

The only fault was the terrible "Darwinismus" which spread over the
section and crept out when you least expected it, even in Fergusson's
lecture on "Buddhist Temples."

You will have the rare happiness to see your ideas triumphant during
your lifetime.

P.S.--I am preparing to go into opposition; I can't stand it.

[This lecture "On a Piece of Chalk," together with two others delivered
this year, seem to me to mark the maturing of his style into that
mastery of clear expression for which he deliberately laboured, the
saying exactly what he meant, neither too much nor too little, without
confusion and without obscurity. Have something to say, and say it, was
the Duke of Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which
has to be said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on
each word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are
clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact some time and get set
right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use
language which will give a loophole of escape either way, there is no
hope for you.

This was the secret of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism
on style find a better illustration, "Le style c'est l'homme meme." In
him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and
literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest
scientific habit of mind; for showing that truthfulness need not be
bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than in luxuriance
of diction. Years after, no less an authority than Spedding, in a letter
upon the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of
exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the
reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, asserted that, if as
a young man he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they
would have produced the same effect upon him.

Of the other two discourses referred to, one is the opening address
which he delivered as Principal at the South London Working Men's
College on January 4, "A Liberal Education, and Where to Find It." This
is not a brief for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay
has insisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education,
whether it be classical or scientific; but it urged the necessity for a
strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern conception of
the world, created by the spread of natural knowledge, is to be fairly
understood. If culture is the "criticism of life," it is fallacious if
deprived of knowledge of the most important factor which has transformed
the medieval into the modern spirit.

Two of his most striking passages are to be found in this address; one
the simile of the force behind nature as the hidden chess player; the
other the noble description of the end of a true education.

Well known as it is, I venture to quote the latter as an instance of his
style:--]

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear cold logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as
forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of
the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her
operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others
as himself.

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely;
she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.

[The third of these discourses is the address "On the Physical Basis of
Life," of which he writes to Haeckel on January 20, 1869:--]

You will be amused to hear that I went to the holy city, Edinburgh
itself, the other day, for the purpose of giving the first of a series
of Sunday lectures. I came back without being stoned; but Murchison (who
is a Scotchman you know), told me he thought it was the boldest act of
my life. The lecture will be published in February, and I shall send it
to you, as it contains a criticism of materialism which I should like
you to consider.

[In it he explains in popular form a striking generalisation of
scientific research, namely, that whether in animals or plants, the
structural unit of the living body is made up of similar material, and
that vital action and even thought are ultimately based upon molecular
changes in this life-stuff. Materialism! gross and brutal materialism!
was the mildest comment he expected in some quarters; and he took the
opportunity to explain how he held] "this union of materialistic
terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy,"
[considering the latter] "to involve grave philosophic error."

[His expectations were fully justified; in fact, he writes that some
persons seemed to imagine that he had invented protoplasm for the
purposes of the lecture.

Here, too, in the course of a reply to Archbishop Thompson's confusion
of the spirit of modern thought with the system of M. Comte, he launched
his well-known definition of Comtism as Catholicism MINUS Christianity,
which involved him in a short controversy with Mr. Congreve (see "The
Scientific Aspects of Positivism," "Lay Sermons" page 162), and with
another leading Positivist, who sent him a letter through Mr. Darwin.
Huxley replied:--]

Jermyn Street, March 11, 1869.

My dear Darwin,

I know quite enough of Mr. -- to have paid every attention to what he
has to say, even if you had not been his ambassador.

I glanced over his letter when I returned home last night very tired
with my two nights' chairmanship at the Ethnological and the Geological
Societies.

Most of it is fair enough, though I must say not helping me to any novel
considerations.

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