Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 3 | Page 8

ups and downs of his health are reflected in
various letters of these six months. Much set up by his stay in the Isle
of Wight, he writes from Shanklin on April 11 to Sir E. Frankland,
describing the last meeting of the x Club, which the latter had not been
able to attend, as he was staying in the Riviera:--]
Hooker, Tyndall, and I alone turned up last Thursday. Lubbock had
gone to High Elms about used up by the House of Commons, and there
was no sign of Hirst.
Tyndall seemed quite himself again. In fact, we three old fogies voted
unanimously that we were ready to pit ourselves against any three
youngsters of the present generation in walking, climbing, or
head-work, and give them odds.
I hope you are in the same comfortable frame of mind.
I had no notion that Mentone had suffered so seriously in the
earthquake of 1887. Moral for architects: read your Bible and build
your house upon the rock.
The sky and sea here may be fairly matched against Mentone or any
other of your Mediterranean places. Also the east wind, which has been
blowing steadily for ten days, and is nearly as keen as the Tramontana.
Only in consequence of the long cold and drought not a leaf is out.
[Shanklin, indeed, suited him so well that he had half a mind to settle
there.] "There are plenty of sites for building," [he writes home in
February,] "but I have not thought of commencing a house yet."
[However, he gave up the idea; Shanklin was too far from town.
But though he was well enough as long as he kept out of London, a
return to his life there was not possible for any considerable time. On
May 19, just before a visit to Mr. F. Darwin at Cambridge, I find that
he went down to St. Albans for a couple of days, to walk; and on the
27th he betook himself, terribly ill and broken down, to the Savernake
Forest Hotel, in hopes of getting] "screwed up." [This] "turned out a
capital speculation, a charming spick-and-span little country hostelry
with great trees in front." [But the weather was persistently bad,] "the
screws got looser rather than tighter," [and again he was compelled to

stay away from the x.
A week later, however, he writes:--]
The weather has been detestable, and I got no good till yesterday,
which was happily fine. Ditto to-day, so I am picking up, and shall
return to-morrow, as, like an idiot as I am, I promised to take the chair
at a public meeting about a Free Library for Marylebone on Tuesday
evening.
I wonder if you know this country. I find it charming.
[On the same day as that which was fixed for the meeting in favour of
the Free Library, he had a very interesting interview with the Premier,
of which he left the following notes, written at the Athenaeum
immediately after:--]
June 7, 1887.
Called on Lord Salisbury by appointment at 3 p.m., and had twenty
minutes' talk with him about the "matter of some public interest"
mentioned in his letter of the [29th].
This turned out to be a proposal for the formal recognition of
distinguished services in Science, Letters, and Art by the institution of
some sort of order analogous to the Pour le Merite. Lord Salisbury
spoke of the anomalous present mode of distributing honours, intimated
that the Queen desired to establish a better system, and asked my
opinion.
I said that I should like to separate my personal opinion from that
which I believed to obtain among the majority of scientific men; that I
thought many of the latter were much discontented with the present
state of affairs, and would highly approve of such a proposal as Lord
Salisbury shadowed forth.
That, so far as my own personal feeling was concerned, it was opposed
to anything of the kind for Science. I said that in Science we had two
advantages--first, that a man's work is demonstrably either good or bad;
and secondly, that the "contemporary posterity" of foreigners judges us,
and rewards good work by membership of Academies and so forth.
In Art, if a man chooses to call Raphael a dauber, you can't prove he is
wrong; and literary work is just as hard to judge.
I then spoke of the dangers to which science is exposed by the undue
prominence and weight of men who successfully apply scientific
knowledge to practical purposes--engineers, chemical inventors, etc.,

etc.; said it appeared to me that a Minister having such order at his
disposal would find it very difficult to resist the pressure brought by
such people as against the man of high science who had not happened
to have done anything to