Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3
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Leonard Huxley >> The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3
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To those who think that questions of the kind I have been discussing
have merely an academic interest, let me suggest once more that a
century ago Robespierre and St. Just proved that the way of answering
them may have extremely practical consequences.
[Without pretending to offer any offhand solution for so vast a
problem, he suggests two points in conclusion. One, that in considering
the matter we should proceed from the known to the unknown, and take
warning from the results of either extreme in self-government or the
government of a family; the other, that the central point is] "the fact
that the natural order of things--the order, that is to say, as
unmodified by human effort--does not tend to bring about what we
understand as welfare." [The population question has first to be faced.
The following letters cover the period up to the trip to the Canaries,
already alluded to:--]
3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, January 6, 1890.
My dear Foster,
That capital photograph reached me just as we were going up to town
(invited for the holidays by our parents), and I put it in my bag to
remind me to write to you. Need I say that I brought it back again
without having had the grace to send a line of thanks? By way of making
my peace, I have told the Fine Art Society to send you a copy of the
engraving of my sweet self. I have not had it framed--firstly, because
it is a hideous nuisance to be obliged to hang a frame one may not
like; and secondly, because by possibility you might like some other
portrait better, in which case, if you will tell me, I will send that
other. I should like you to have something by way of reminder of T.H.H.
When Harry [His younger son.] has done his work at Bart's at the end of
March I am going to give him a run before he settles down to practice.
Probably we shall go to the Canaries. I hear that the man who knows
most about them is Dr. Guillemard, a Cambridge man. "Kennst ihn du
wohl?" Perhaps he might give me a wrinkle.
With our united best wishes to you all.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Eastbourne, January 13, 1890.
My dear Hooker,
We missed you on the 2nd, though you were quite right not to come in
that beastly weather.
My boy Harry has had a very sharp attack of influenza at Bartholomew's,
and came down to us to convalesce a week ago, very much pulled down. I
hope you will keep clear of it.
Harry's work at the hospital is over at the end of March, and before
the influenza business I was going to give him a run for a month or six
weeks before he settled down to practice. We shall go to the Canaries
as soon in April as possible. Are you minded to take a look at
Teneriffe? Only 4 1/2 days' sea--good ships.
Ever yours affectionately,
T.H. Huxley.
[However, Sir J. Hooker was unable to join "the excursion to the Isles
of the Blest."]
Eastbourne, January 27, 1890.
My dear Foster,
People have been at me to publish my notice of Darwin in the
"Proceedings of the Royal Society" in a separate form.
If you have no objection, will you apply to the Council for me for the
requisite permission?
But if you DO see any objection, I would rather not make the request.
I think if I republish it I will add the "Times" article of 1859 to it.
Omega and Alpha!
Hope you are flourishing. We shall be up for a few days next week.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
Eastbourne, January 31, 1890.
My dear Foster,
Mind you let me know what points you think want expanding in the Darwin
obituary when we meet.
We go to town on Tuesday for a few days, and I will meet you anywhere
or anywhen you like. Could you come and dine with us at 4 P.M. on
Thursday? If so, please let me know at once, that E. may kill the
fatted calf.
Harry has been and gone and done it. We heard he had gone to Yorkshire,
and were anxious, thinking that at the very least a relapse after his
influenza (which he had sharply) had occurred.
But the complaint was one with more serious sequelae still. Don't know
the young lady, but the youth has a wise head on his shoulders, and
though that did not prevent Solomon from overdoing the business, I have
every faith in his choice.
Dr. Guillemard has kindly sent me a lot of valuable information; but as
I suggested to my boy yesterday, he may find Yorkshire air more
wholesome than that of the Canaries, and it is ten to one we don't go
after all.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[To his younger son:--]
Eastbourne, January 30, 1890.
You dear old humbug of a Boy,
Here we have been mourning over the relapse of influenza, which alone,
as we said, could have torn you from your duties, and all the while it
was nothing but an attack of palpitation such as young people are
liable to and seem none the worse for after all. We are as happy that
you are happy as you can be yourself, though from your letter that
seems saying a great deal. I am prepared to be the young lady's slave;
pray tell her that I am a model father-in-law, with my love. (By the
way, you might mention her name; it is a miserable detail, I know, but
would be interesting.) Please add that she is humbly solicited to grant
leave of absence for the Teneriffe trip, unless she thinks Northampton
air more invigorating.
Ever your loving dad,
T.H. Huxley.
On April 3, accompanied by his son, he left London on board the
"Aorangi". At Plymouth he had time to meet his friend W.F. Collier, and
to visit the Zoological Station, while], "to my great satisfaction,"
[he writes], "I received a revise (i.e. of 'Capital the Mother of
Labour') for the May 'Nineteenth Century'--from Knowles. They must have
looked sharp at the printing-office."
[It did not take him long to recover his sea-legs, and he thoroughly
enjoyed even the rougher days when the rolling of the ship was too much
for other people. The day before reaching Teneriffe he writes:--]
I have not felt so well for a long time. I do nothing, have a
prodigious appetite, and Harry declares I am getting fat in the face.
[Santa Cruz was reached early on April 10, and in the afternoon he
proceeded to Laguna, which he made his headquarters for a week. That
day he walked 10 miles, the next 15, and the third 20 in the course of
the day. He notes finding the characteristic Euphorbia and Heaths of
the Canaries; notes, too, one or two visitations of dyspepsia from
indigestible food. He writes from Laguna:--]
From all that people with whom we meet tell me, I gather that the usual
massive lies about health resorts pervade the accounts of Teneriffe.
Santa Cruz would reduce me to jelly in a week, and I hear that Orotava
is worse--stifling. Guimar, whither we go to-morrow, is warranted to be
dry and everlasting sunshine. We shall see. One of the people staying
in the house said they had rain there for a fortnight together...I am
all right now, and walked some 15 miles up hill and down dale to-day,
and I am not more than comfortably tired. However, I am not going to
try the peak. I find it cannot be done without a night out at a
considerable height when the thermometer commonly goes down below
freezing, and I am not going to run that risk for the chance of seeing
even the famous shadows.
[By some mischance, no letters from home reached him till the 26th, and
he writes from Guimar on the 23rd:--]
A lady who lives here told me yesterday that a postmistress at one
place was in the habit of taking off the stamps and turning the letters
on one side! But that luckily is not a particular dodge with ours.
We drove over here on the 17th. It is a very picturesque place 1000
feet up in the midst of a great amphitheatre of high hills, facing
north, orange-trees laden with fruit, date palms and bananas are in the
garden, and there is lovely sunshine all day long. Altogether the
climate is far the best I have found anywhere here, and the house,
which is that of a Spanish Marquesa, only opened as a hotel this
winter, is very comfortable. I am sitting with the window wide open at
nine o'clock at night, and the stars flash as if the sky were
Australian.
On Saturday we had a splendid excursion up to the top of the pass that
leads from here up to the other side of the island. Road in the proper
sense there was none, and the track incredibly bad, worse than any
Alpine path owing to the loose irregular stones. The mules, however,
pick their way like cats, and you have only to hold on. The pass is
6000 feet high, and we ascended still higher. Fortune favoured us. It
was a lovely day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet
below. The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic 5000
feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs
(a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. [(The Canadas, which he
calls] "the one thing worth seeing there.") It took us three hours and
a half to get up, passing for a good deal of the time through a kind of
low brush of white and red cistuses in full bloom. We saw Palma on one
side, and Grand Canary on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which
enveloped all the lower part of the island. Coming down was worse than
going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back about six.
About seven hours in the saddle and walking.
You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry. He is burnt deep
red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and at the end of the journey
he raced Gurilio, our guide, who understands no word of English any
more than we do Spanish, but we are quite intimate nevertheless. [My
brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far more
effectual than the Spanish which my father persisted in trying upon the
inhabitants. This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as to any
Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much less
beating him in a race over the stony track. His experience was entirely
limited to invalids.]
He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his wife:
"Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long without--never
again." When, after all, the delayed letters reached him on his way
back from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a traveller who
brought them up from Laguna, he writes (April 24):--]
Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly
anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you are.
Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has
led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.
[Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto Orotava:--]
It is very pretty to look at, but all draughts. I compare it to the air
of a big wash-house with all the doors open, and it was agreed that the
likeness was exact.
[On May 2 he sailed for Madeira by the "German", feeling already "ten
years younger" for his holiday. On the 3rd he writes:--]
The last time I was in this place was in 1846. All my life lies between
the two visits. I was then twenty-one and a half and I shall be
sixty-five to-morrow. The place looks to me to have grown a good deal,
but I believe it is chiefly English residents whose villas dot the
hill. There were no roads forty-four years ago. Now there is one, I am
told, to Camera do Lobos nearly five miles long. That is the measure of
Portuguese progress in half a century. Moreover, the men have left off
wearing their pigtail caps and the women their hoods.
[To his youngest daughter:--]
Bella Vista Hotel, Funchal, May 6, 1890.
Dearest Babs,
This comes wishing you many happy returns of the day, though a little
late in the arrival. Harry sends his love, and desires me to say that
he took care to write a letter which should arrive in time, but
unfortunately forgot to mention the birthday in it! So I think, on the
whole, I have the pull of him. We ought to be back about the 18th or
19th, as I have put my name down for places in the "Conway Castle",
which is to call here on the 12th, and I do not suppose she will be
full. In the meanwhile, we shall fill up the time by a trip to the
other side of the island, on which we start to-morrow morning at 7.30.
You have to take your own provisions and rugs to sleep upon and under,
as the fleas la bas are said to be unusually fine and active. We start
quite a procession with a couple of horses, a guide, and two men
(owners of the nags) to carry the baggage; and I suspect that before
to-morrow night we shall have made acquaintance with some remarkably
bad apologies for roads. But the horses here seem to prefer going up
bad staircases at speed (with a man hanging on by the tail to steer),
and if you only stick to them they land you all right. I have developed
so much prowess in this line that I think of coming out in the
character of Buffalo Bill on my return. Hands and face of both of us
are done to a good burnt sienna, and a few hours more or less in the
saddle don't count. I do not think either of us have been so well for
years.
You will have heard of our doings in Teneriffe from M--. The Canadas
there is the one thing worth seeing, altogether unique. As a health
resort I should say the place is a fraud--always excepting Guimar--and
that, excellent for people in good health, is wholly unfit for a real
invalid, who must either go uphill or downhill over the worst of roads
if he leaves the hotel.
The air here is like that of South Devon at its best--very soft, but
not stifling as at Orotava. We had a capital expedition yesterday to
the Grand Corral--the ancient volcanic crater in the middle of the
island with walls some 3000 feet high, all scarred and furrowed by
ravines, and overgrown with rich vegetation. There is a little village
at the bottom of it which I should esteem as a retreat if I wished to
be out of sight and hearing of the pomps and vanities of this world. By
the way, I have been pretty well out of hearing of everything as it is,
for I only had three letters from M-- while we were in Teneriffe, and
not one here up to this date. After I had made all my arrangements to
start to-morrow I heard that a mail would be in at noon. So the letters
will have to follow us in the afternoon by one of the men, who will
wait for them.
We went to-day to lunch with Mr. Blandy, the head of the principal
shipping agency here, whose wife is the daughter of my successor at the
Fishery Office.
Well, our trip has done us both a world of good; but I am getting
homesick, and shall rejoice to be back again. I hope that Joyce is
flourishing, and Jack satisfied with the hanging of his pictures, and
that a millionaire has insisted on buying the picture and adding a
bonus. Our
best love to you all.
Ever your loving Pater.
Don't know M--'s whereabouts. But if she is with you, say I wrote her a
long screed (Number 8) and posted it to-day--with my love as a model
husband and complete letter-writer.
[On returning home he found that the Linnean medal had been awarded
him.]
4 Marlborough Place, May 18, 1890.
My dear Hooker,
How's a' wi' you? My boy and I came back from Madeira yesterday in
great feather. As for myself, riding about on mules, or horses, for six
to ten hours at a stretch--burning in sun or soaking in rain--over the
most entirely breakneck roads and tracks I have ever made acquaintance
with, except perhaps in Morocco--has proved a most excellent tonic,
cathartic, and alterative all in one. Existence of heart and stomach
are matters of faith, not of knowledge, with me at present. I hope it
may last, and I have had such a sickener of invalidism that my
intention is to keep severely out of all imprudences.
But what is a man to do if his friends take advantage of his absence,
and go giving him gold medals behind his back? That you have been an
accomplice in this nefarious plot--mine own familiar friend whom I
trusted and trust--is not to be denied. Well, it is very pleasant to
have toil that is now all ancient history remembered, and I shall go to
the meeting and the dinner and make my speech in spite of as many
possible devils of dyspepsia as there are plates and dishes on the
table.
We were lucky in getting in for nothing worse than heavy rolling,
either out or in. Teneriffe is well worth seeing. The Canadas is
something quite by itself, a bit of Egypt 6000 feet up with a bare
volcanic cone, or rather long barrow sticking up 6000 feet in the
middle of it.
Otherwise, Madeira is vastly superior. I rode across from Funchal to
Sao Vicente, up to Paul da Serra, then along the coast to Santa Anna,
and back from Santa Anna to Funchal. I have seen nothing comparable
except in Mauritius, nor anything anywhere like the road by the cliffs
from Sao Vicente to Santa Anna. Lucky for me that my ancient nautical
habit of sticking on to a horse came back. A good deal of the road is
like a bad staircase, with no particular banisters, and a well of 1000
feet with the sea at the bottom. Your heart would rejoice over the
great heaths. I saw one, the bole of which split into nearly equal
trunks; and one of these was just a metre in circumference, and had a
head as big as a moderate-sized ash. Gorse in full flower, up to 12 or
15 feet high. On the whole a singular absence of flowering herbs except
Cinerarias and, especially in Teneriffe, Echium. I did not chance to
see a Euphorbia in Madeira, though I believe there are some. In
Teneriffe they are everywhere in queer shapes, and there was a thing
that mimicked the commonest Euphorbia but had no milk, which I will ask
you about when I see you. The Euphorbias were all in flower, but this
thing had none. But you will have had enough of my scrawl.
Ever yours affectionately,
T.H. Huxley.
CHAPTER 3.7.
1890-1891.
[Three letters of the first half of the year may conveniently be placed
here. The first is to Tyndall, who had just been delivering an
anti-Gladstonian speech at Belfast. The opening reference must be to
some newspaper paragraph which I have not been able to trace, just as
the second is to a paragraph in 1876, not long after Tyndall's
marriage, which described Huxley as starting for America with his
titled bride.]
3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, February 24, 1890.
My dear Tyndall,
Put down the three half-pints and the two dozen to the partnership
account. Ever since the "titled bride" business I have given up the
struggle against the popular belief that you and I constitute a firm.
It's very hard on me in the decline of life to have a lively young
partner who thinks nothing of rushing six or seven hundred miles to
perform a war-dance on the sainted G.O.M., and takes the scalp of
Historicus as an hors d'oeuvre.
All of which doubtless goes down to my account just as my poor innocent
articles confer a reputation for long-suffering mildness on you.
Well! well! there is no justice in this world! With our best love to
you both.
Ever yours,
T.H. Huxley.
[(The confusion in the popular mind continued steadily, so that at
last, when Tyndall died, Huxley received the doubtful honour of a
funeral sermon.)
Dr. Pelseneer, to whom the next letter is addressed, is a Belgian
morphologist, and an authority upon the Mollusca. He it was who
afterwards completed Huxley's unfinished memoir on Spirula for the
"Challenger" report.]
4 Marlborough Place, June 10, 1890.
Dear Dr. Pelseneer,
I gave directions yesterday for the packing up and sending to your
address of the specimens of Trigonia, and I trust that they will reach
you safely.
I am rejoiced that you are about to take up the subject. I was but a
beginner when I worked at Trigonia, and I had always promised myself
that I would try to make good the many deficiencies of my little
sketch. But three or four years ago my health gave way completely, and
though I have recovered (no less to my own astonishment than to that of
the doctors) I am compelled to live out of London and to abstain from
all work which involves much labour.
Thus science has got so far ahead of me that I hesitate to say much
about a difficult morphological question--all the more, as old men like
myself should be on their guard against over-much tenderness for their
own speculations. And I am conscious of a great tenderness for those
contained in my ancient memoir on the "Morphology of the Cephalous
Mollusca." Certainly I am entirely disposed to agree with you that the
Gasteropods and the Lamellibranchs spring from a common root--nearly
represented by the Chiton--especially by a hypothetical Chiton with one
shell plate.
I always thought Nucula the key to the Lamellibranchs, and I am very
glad you have come to that conclusion on such much better evidence.
I am, dear Dr. Pelseneer, yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[Towards the end of June he went for a week to Salisbury, taking long
walks in the neighbourhood, and exploring the town and cathedral, which
he confessed himself ashamed never to have seen before.
He characteristically fixes its date in his memory by noting that the
main part of it was completed when Dante was a year old.]
The White Hart, Salisbury, June 22, 1890.
My dear Donnelly,
Couldn't stand any more London, so bolted here yesterday morning, and
here I shall probably stop for the next few days.
I have been trying any time the last thirty years to see Stonehenge,
and this time I mean to do it. I should have gone to-day, but the
weather was not promising, so I spent my Sunday morning in Old
Sarum--that blessed old tumulus with nine (or was it eleven?) burgesses
that used to send two members to Parliament when I was a child. Really
you Radicals are of some use after all!
Poor old Smyth's death is just what I expected, though I did not think
the catastrophe was so imminent. [Warrington Wilkinson Smyth
(1817-1890), the geologist and mineralogist. In 1851 he was appointed
Lecturer on Mining and Mineralogy at the Royal School of Mines. After
the lectureships were separated in 1881, he retained the former until
his death. He was knighted in 1887.]
Peace be with him; he never did justice to his very considerable
abilities, but he was a good fellow and a fine old crusted Conservative.
I suppose it will be necessary to declare the vacancy and put somebody
in his place before long.
I learned before I started that Smyth was to be buried in Cornwall, so
there is no question of attending at his funeral.
I am the last of the original Jermyn Street gang left in the school
now--Ultimus Romanorum!
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[This trip was taken by way of a holiday after the writing of an
article, which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" for July 1890. It
was called "The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science," and may
be considered as written in fulfilment of the plan spoken of in the
letter to Mr. Clodd (above). Its subject was the necessary dependence
of Christian theology upon the historical accuracy of the Old
Testament; its occasion, the publication of a sermon in which, as a
counterblast to "Lux Mundi", Canon Liddon declared that accuracy to be
sanctioned by the use made of the Old Testament by Jesus Christ, and
bade his hearers close their ears against any suggestions impairing the
credit of those Jewish Scriptures which have received the stamp of His
Divine authority.
Pointing out that, as in other branches of history, so here the
historical accuracy of early tradition was abandoned even by
conservative critics, who at all understood the nature of the problems
involved, Huxley proceeded to examine the story of the Flood, and to
show that the difficulties were little less in treating it--like the
reconcilers--as a partial than as a universal deluge. Then he discussed
the origin of the story, and criticised the attempt of the essayist in
"Lux Mundi" to treat this and similar stories as "types," which must be
valueless if typical of no underlying reality. These things are of
moment in speculative thought, for if Adam be not an historical
character, if the story of the Fall be but a type, the basis of Pauline
theology is shaken; they are of moment practically, for it is the story
of the Creation which is referred to in the] "speech (Matt. 19 5)
unhappily famous for the legal oppression to which it has been
wrongfully forced to lend itself" [in the marriage laws.
In July 1890, Sir J.G.T. Sinclair wrote to him, calling his attention
to a statement of Babbage's that after a certain point his famous
calculating machine, contrary to all expectation, suddenly introduced a
new principle of numeration into a series of numbers (Extract from
Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. Babbage shows that a calculating
machine can be constructed which, after working in a correct and
orderly manner up to 100,000,000, then leaps, and instead of continuing
the chain of numbers unbroken, goes at once to 100,010,002. "The law
which seemed at first to govern the series failed at the hundred
million and second term. This term is larger than we expected by
10,000. The law thus changes:--
100,000,001
100,010,002
100,030,003
100,060,004
100,100,005
100,150,006
100,210,007
100,280,008.
For a hundred or even a thousand terms they continued to follow the new
law relating to the triangular numbers, but after watching them for
2761 terms we find that this law fails at the 2762nd term.
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