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

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