Still she was on the whole much better and stronger than I had any right to expect, and although I get frightened every now and then, yet there can be no doubt that she is steadily though slowly improving.  I have no fears for the ultimate result, but her amendment will be a work of time.  We have really quite settled down into Darby and Joan, and I begin to regard matrimony as the normal state of man.  It’s wonderful how light the house looks when I come back weary with a day’s boating to what it used to do.

I hope Mrs. Hooker is well and about again.  Pray give her our very kind regards, and believe me, my dear Hooker, ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[At Tenby he stayed on through August and September, continuing his occupations of the previous summer, dredging up specimens for his microscope, and working partly for his own investigations, partly for the Geological Survey.

CHAPTER 1.10.

1855-1858.

Up to his appointment at the School of Mines, Huxley’s work had been almost entirely morphological, dealing with the Invertebrates.  His first investigations, moreover, had been directed not to species-hunting, but to working out the real affinities of little known orders, and thereby evolving a philosophical classification from the limbo of “Vermes” and “Radiata.”

He had continued the same work by tracing homologies of development in other classes of animals, such as the Cephalous Mollusca, the Articulata, and the Brachiopods.  On these subjects, also, he had a good deal of correspondence with other investigators of the same cast of mind, and even when he did not carry conviction, the impression made by his arguments may be judged from the words of Dr. Allman, no mean authority, in a letter of May 2, 1852:—­]

I have thought over your arguments again and again, and while I am the more convinced of their ingenuity, originality, and strength, I yet feel ashamed to confess that I too must exclaim “tenax propositi.”  When was it otherwise in controversy?

[Other speculations arising out of these researches had been given to the public in the form of lectures, notably that on Animal Individuality at the Royal Institution in 1852.

But after 1854, Paleontology and administrative work began to claim much of the time he would willingly have bestowed upon distinctly zoological research.  His lectures on Natural History of course demanded a good deal of first-hand investigation, and not only occasional notes in his fragmentary journals, but a vast mass of drawings now preserved at South Kensington attest the amount of work he still managed to give to these subjects.  But with the exception of the Hunterian Lectures of 1868, he only published one paper on Invertebrates as late as 1860; and only half a dozen, not counting the belated “Oceanic Hydrozoa,” bear 1856 and 1859.  The essay on the Crayfish did not appear until after he had left Jermyn Street and Paleontology for South Kensington.