Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2
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Leonard Huxley >> The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2
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30 Produced by Sue Asscher asschers@bigpond.com
LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
BY HIS SON
LEONARD HUXLEY.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOLUME 2.
(PLATE: T.H. HUXLEY, PHOTOGRAPH BY WALKER AND COCKERILL, PH. SC.
SIGNED T.H. HUXLEY, 1857.)
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.
CHAPTER 2.2. 1871.
CHAPTER 2.3. 1872.
CHAPTER 2.4. 1873.
CHAPTER 2.5. 1874.
CHAPTER 2.6. 1875-1876.
CHAPTER 2.7. 1875-1876.
CHAPTER 2.8. 1876.
CHAPTER 2.9. 1877.
CHAPTER 2.10. 1878.
CHAPTER 2.11. 1879.
CHAPTER 2.12. 1881.
CHAPTER 2.13. 1882.
CHAPTER 2.14. 1883.
CHAPTER 2.15. 1884.
CHAPTER 2.16. 1884-1885.
CHAPTER 2.17. 1885.
CHAPTER 2.18. 1886.
CHAPTER 2.19. 1886.
CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.
[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.
From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years
of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had
been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by
his personal energy and power. When at length settled in the
professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself
more than a beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the
field of knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred
subjects in order to know the true bearings of his own little portion,
that he treated the next six years simply as years of further
apprenticeship. Under the suggestive power of the "Origin of Species"
all these scattered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the
philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his thought
with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in defence of the new
hypothesis first brought him before the public eye as one who not only
had the courage of his convictions when attacked, but could, and more,
would, carry the war effectively into the enemy's country. And for the
next ten years he was commonly identified with the championship of the
most unpopular view of the time; a fighter, an assailant of
long-established fallacies, he was too often considered a mere
iconoclast, a subverter of every other well-rooted institution,
theological, educational, or moral.
It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in
the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies.
His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual
gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held
"without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by
W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism,
materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in
token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of
the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by
the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."
But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came
forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform,
seeking not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show,
in theory and practice, how scientific training might be introduced
into the general system of education. He was more than once asked to
stand for Parliament, but refused, thinking he could do more useful
work for his country outside.
The publication in 1870 of "Lay Sermons," the first of a series of
similar volumes, served, by concentrating his moral and intellectual
philosophy, to make his influence as a teacher of men more widely
felt. The "active scepticism," whose conclusions many feared, was yet
acknowledged as the quality of mind which had made him one of the
clearest thinkers and safest scientific guides of his time, while his
keen sense of right and wrong made the more reflective of those who
opposed his conclusions hesitate long before expressing a doubt as to
the good influence of his writings. This view is very clearly
expressed in a review of the book in the "Nation" (New York 1870 11
407).
And as another review of the "Lay Sermons" puts it ("Nature" 3 22), he
began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy
smooth things.
During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than
upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of
four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in
addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work,
and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the
popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the
progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological
researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian
lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870
onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.
For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after
another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to
increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological
Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the
Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the
Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society'
which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of
the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to
1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied
no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very
high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this
country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short
through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal
Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)
The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He
published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on
two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other
on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.
The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to
the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the
year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was
President, on "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief
Modifications of Mankind," March 9--and on "The Ethnology of Britain,"
May 10--the substance of which appeared in the "Contemporary Review"
for July under the title of "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology"
("Collected Essays" 7 253). As President also of the Geological
Society and of the British Association, he had two important addresses
to deliver. In addition to this, he delivered an address before the
Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on "Descartes' Discourse."
How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to
Down:--]
26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.
My dear Darwin,
It is hard to resist an invitation of yours--but I dine out on
Saturday; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of
one kind or another. And there is that horrid Geological address
looming in the future!
I am afraid I must deny myself at present.
I am glad you liked the sermon. Did you see the "Devonshire man's"
attack in the "Pall Mall?"
I have been wasting my time in polishing that worthy off. I would not
have troubled myself about him, if it were not for the political
bearing of the Celt question just now.
My wife sends her love to all you.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[The reference to the "Devonshire Man" is as follows:--Huxley had been
speaking of the strong similarity between Gaul and German, Celt and
Teuton, before the change of character brought about by the Latin
conquest; and of the similar commixture, a dash of Anglo-Saxon in the
mass of Celtic, which prevailed in our western borders and many parts
of Ireland, e.g. Tipperary.
The "Devonshire Man" wrote on January 18 to the "Pall Mall Gazette,"
objecting to the statement that "Devonshire men are as little
Anglo-Saxons as Northumbrians are Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st,
meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and
especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show
that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the
German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between
the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous
question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or
the pure Irish? Milesian, Firbolg, or Cruithneach?
But the "Devonshire Man" did not confine himself to science. He
indulged in various personalities, to the smartest of which, a parody
of Sydney Smith's dictum on Dr. Whewell, Huxley replied:--]
"A Devonshire Man" is good enough to say of me that "cutting up
monkeys is his forte, and cutting up men is his foible." With your
permission, I propose to cut up "A Devonshire Man"; but I leave it to
the public to judge whether, when so employed, my occupation is to be
referred to the former or to the latter category.
[For this he was roundly lectured by the "Spectator" on January 29, in
an article under the heading "Pope Huxley." Regardless of the rights
or wrongs of the controversy, he was chidden for the abusive language
of the above paragraph, and told that he was a very good anatomist,
but had better not enter into discussions on other subjects.
The same question is developed in the address to the Ethnological
Society later in the year and in "Some Fixed Points in British
Ethnology" (see above), and reiterated in an address from the chair in
Section D at the British Association in 1878 at Dublin, and in a
letter to the "Times" for October 12, 1887, apropos of a leading
article upon "British Race-types of To-day."
Letter-writing was difficult under such pressure of work, but the
claims of absent friends were not wholly forgotten, though left on one
side for a time, and the warm-hearted Dohrn, could not bear to think
himself forgotten, managed to get a letter out of him--not on
scientific business.]
26 Abbey Place, January 30, 1870.
My dear Dohrn,
In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and
thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I
have not written to you. But in another sense, I do not, for I have
very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you
once before, your memory always remains green in the "happy family."
But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion
to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer
I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content
to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we
meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off,
I shall be a friendless old man.
As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture says that "a
living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a living dog. By the
way, I bought Cotta's edition of him the other day, and there he
stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble
edges. Do you know I did a version of his "Aphorisms on Nature" into
English the other day. [For the first number of "Nature," November
1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little. When they
began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly
gone mad!
But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received your
volume on the "Arthropods" the other day, but I shall not be able to
look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my
lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological
Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of
office as President expires.
After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings and, as
always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest interest. But I
wish you would not take it into your head that Darwin or I, or any one
else thinks otherwise than highly of you, or that you need
"re-establishing" in any one's eyes. But I hope you will not have
finished your work before the autumn, as they have made me President
of the British Association this year, and I shall be very busy with my
address in the summer. The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on
the 14th September, and I live in hope that you will be able to come
over. Let me know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.
I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet. But for Heaven's
sake don't be angry with me in English again. It's far worse than a
scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I
have my German friends.
[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological
Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and
the Doctrine of Evolution" "Collected Essays" 8.) He took the
opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed
out the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in
particular traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a
series of fossil types approaching more and more to a generalised
ungulate type and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or
collateral of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two
other toes which appertain to the average quadruped.]
If [he said] the expectation raised by the splints of horses that, in
some ancestor of the horses, these splints would be found to be
complete digits, has been verified, we are furnished with very strong
reasons for looking for a no less complete verification of the
expectation that the three-toed Plagiolophus-like "avus" of the horse
must have been a five-toed "atavus" at some early period.
[Six years afterwards, this forecast of paleontological research was
to be fulfilled, but at the expense of the European ancestry of the
horse. A series of ancestors, similar to these European fossils, but
still more equine, and extending in unbroken order much farther back
in geological time, was discovered in America. His use of this in his
New York lectures as demonstrative evidence of evolution, and the
immediate fulfilment of a further prophecy of his will be told in due
course.
His address to the Cambridge Y.M.C.A, "A Commentary on Descartes'
'Discourse touching the method of using reason rightly, and of seeking
scientific truth,'" was delivered on March 24. This was an attempt to
give this distinctively Christian audience some vision of the world of
science and philosophy, which is neither Christian nor Unchristian,
but Extra-christian, and to show] "by what methods the dwellers
therein try to distinguish truth from falsehood, in regard to some of
the deepest and most difficult problems that beset humanity, "in order
to be clear about their actions, and to walk sure-footedly in this
life," as Descartes says. For Descartes had laid the foundation of his
own guiding principle of "active scepticism, which strives to conquer
itself."
[Here again, as in the "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail,
he explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of
shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted
passage, apropos of the] "introduction of Calvinism into science."
I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think
what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a
sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I
should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about
is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part
with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.
[This was the latest of the essays included in "Lay Sermons, Addresses
and Reviews," which came out, with a dedicatory letter to Tyndall, in
the summer of 1870, and, whether on account of its subject matter or
its title, always remained his most popular volume of essays.
To the same period belongs a letter to Matthew Arnold about his book
"St. Paul and Protestantism."]
My dear Arnold,
Many thanks for your book which I have been diving into at odd times
as leisure served, and picking up many good things.
One of the best is what you say near the end about science gradually
conquering the materialism of popular religion.
It will startle the Puritans who always coolly put the matter the
other way; but it is profoundly true.
These people are for the most part mere idolaters with a Bible-fetish,
who urgently stand in need of conversion by Extra-christian
Missionaries.
It takes all one's practical experience of the importance of Puritan
ways of thinking to overcome one's feeling of the unreality of their
beliefs. I had pretty well forgotten how real to them "the man in the
next street" is, till your citation of their horribly absurd dogmas
reminded me of it. If you can persuade them that Paul is fairly
interpretable in your sense, it may be the beginning of better things,
but I have my doubts if Paul would own you, if he could return to
expound his own epistles.
I am glad you like my Descartes article. My business with my
scientific friends is something like yours with the Puritans, nature
being OUR Paul.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
26 Abbey Place, May 10, 1870.
[From the 14th to the 24th of April Huxley, accompanied by his friend
Hooker, made a trip to the Eifel country. His sketch-book is full of
rapid sketches of the country, many of them geological; one day indeed
there are eight, another nine such.
Tyndall was invited to join the party, and at first accepted, but then
recollected the preliminaries which had to be carried out before his
lectures on electricity at the end of the month. So he writes on April
6:--
Royal Institution, 6 April.
My dear Huxley,
I was rendered drunk by the excess of prospective pleasure when you
mentioned the Eifel yesterday, and took no account of my lectures.
They begin on the 28th, and I have studiously to this hour excluded
them from my thought. I have made arrangements to see various
experiments involving the practical application of electricity before
the lectures begin; I find myself, in short, cut off from the
expedition. My regret on this score is commensurable with the
pleasures I promised myself. Confound the lectures!
And yours on Friday is creating a pretty hubbub already. (On the
Pedigree of the Horse" April 8, 1870, which was never brought out in
book form.) I am torn to pieces by women in search of tickets.
Anything that touches progenitorship interests them. You will have a
crammed house, I doubt not.
Yours ever,
John Tyndall.
Huxley replied:--]
Geological Survey of England and Wales, April 6, 1870.
My dear Tyndall,
DAMN
the
L
e
c
t
u
r
e
s.
T.H.H.
That's a practical application of electricity for you.
[In June he writes to his wife, who has taken a sick child to the
seaside:--]
I hear a curious rumour (which is not for circulation), that Froude
and I have been proposed for D.C.L.'s at Commemoration, and that the
proposition has been bitterly and strongly opposed by Pusey. [Huxley
ultimately received his D.C.L. in 1885.] They say there has been a
regular row in Oxford about it. I suppose this is at the bottom of
Jowett's not writing to me. But I hope that he won't fancy that I
should be disgusted at the opposition and object to come [i.e. to pay
his regular visit to Balliol]. On the contrary, the more complete
Pusey's success, the more desirable it is that I should show my face
there. Altogether it is an awkward position, as I am supposed to know
nothing of what is going on.
[The situation is further developed in a letter to Darwin:--]
Jermyn Street, June 22, 1870.
My dear Darwin,
I sent the books to Queen Anne St. this morning. Pray keep them as
long as you like, as I am not using them.
I am greatly disgusted that you are coming up to London this week, as
we shall be out of town next Sunday. It is the rarest thing in the
world for us to be away, and you have pitched upon the one day. Cannot
we arrange some other day?
I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for
theirs. There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal
board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that
Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were
the blackest heretics out of the list proposed, and that he was glad
to assent to your being doctored, when he got back, in order to keep
out seven devils worse than that first!
Ever, oh Coryphaeus diabolicus, your faithful follower,
T.H. Huxley.
[The choice of a subject for his Presidential Address at the British
Association for 1870, a subject which, as he put it,] "has lain
chiefly in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere
grubs and mouldiness," [was suggested by a recent controversy upon the
origin of life, in which the experiments of Dr. Bastian, then
Professor of Pathological Anatomy at University College, London, which
seemed to prove spontaneous generation, were shown by Professor
Tyndall to contain a flaw. Huxley had naturally been deeply interested
from the first; he had been consulted by Dr. Bastian, and, I believe,
had advised him not to publish until he had made quite sure of his
ground. This question and the preparation of the course of Elementary
Biology [See below.] led him to carry on a series of investigations
lasting over two years, which took shape in a paper upon "Penicillium,
Torula, and Bacterium", first read in Section D at the British
Association, 1870 ("Quarterly Journal of Micr. Science" 1870 10 pages
355-362.); and in his article on "Yeast" in the "Contemporary Review"
for December 1871. He laboriously repeated Pasteur's experiments, and
for years a quantity of flasks and cultures used in this work remained
at South Kensington, until they were destroyed in the eighties. Of
this work Sir J. Hooker writes to him:--
You have made an immense leap in the association of forms, and I
cannot but suppose you approach the final solution...
I have always fancied that it was rather brains and boldness, than
eyes or microscopes that the mycologists wanted, and that there was
more brains in Berkeley's [Reverend M.J. Berkeley.] crude discoveries
than in the very best of the French and German microscopic
verifications of them, who filch away the credit of them from under
Berkeley's nose, and pooh-pooh his reasoning, but for which we should
be, as we were.
In his Presidential Address, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis" ("Collected
Essays" 8 page 229), he discussed the rival theories of spontaneous
generation and the universal derivation of life from precedent life,
and professed his belief, as an act of philosophic faith, that at some
remote period, life had arisen out of inanimate matter, though there
was no evidence that anything of the sort had occurred recently, the
germ theory explaining many supposed cases of spontaneous generation.
The history of the subject, indeed, showed] "the great tragedy of
Science--the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact--which
is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers," and
recalled the warning "that it is one thing to refute a proposition,
and another to prove the truth of a doctrine which, implicitly or
explicitly, contradicts that proposition."
[Two letters to Dr. Dohrn refer to this address and to the meeting of
the Association.]
Jermyn Street, April 30, 1870.
My dear Whirlwind,
I have received your two letters; and I was just revolving in my mind
how best to meet your wishes in regard to the very important project
mentioned in the first, when the second arrived and put me at rest.
I hope I need not say how heartily I enter into all your views, and
how glad I shall be to see your plan for "Stations" carried into
effect. [Dr. Dohrn succeeded in establishing such a zoological
"station" at Naples.] Nothing could have a greater influence upon the
progress of zoology.
A plan was set afoot here some time ago to establish a great marine
Aquarium at Brighton by means of a company. They asked me to be their
President, but I declined, on the ground that I did not desire to
become connected with any commercial undertaking. What has become of
the scheme I do not know, but I doubt whether it would be of any use
to you, even if any connection could be established.
As soon as you have any statement of your project ready, send it to me
and I will take care that it is brought prominently before the British
public so as to stir up their minds. And then we will have a regular
field-day about it in Section D at Liverpool.
Let me know your new ideas about insects and vertebrata as soon as
possible, and I promise to do my best to pull them to pieces. What
between Kowalesky and his Ascidians, Miklucho-Maclay [A Russian
naturalist, and close friend of Haeckel's, who later adventured
himself alone among the cannibals of New Guinea.] and his Fish-brains,
and you and your Arthropods, I am becoming schwindelsuchtig, and spend
my time mainly in that pious ejaculation "Donner and Blitz," in which,
as you know, I seek relief. Then there is our Bastian who is making
living things by the following combination:--
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