The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 2 | Page 5

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