Yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

October 10, 1860.

My dear Spencer [This was written at the time when Mr. Spencer had issued a notice of discontinuance, and when measures were being taken to prevent it.],

“A wilful man must have his way,” and if you won’t let me contribute towards the material guarantees for the success of your book, I must be content to add twelve shillings’ worth of moral influence to that I already meant to exert per annum in its favour.

I shall be most glad henceforth, as ever, to help your great undertaking in any way I can.  The more I contemplate its issues the more important does it seem to me to be, and I assure you that I look upon its success as the business of all of us.  So that if it were not a pleasure I should feel it a duty to “push behind” as hard as I can.

Have you seen this quarter’s “Westminster?” The opening article on “Neo-Christianity” is one of the most remarkable essays in its way I have ever read.  I suppose it must be Newman’s.  The “Review” is terribly unequal, some of the other articles being absolutely ungrammatically written.  What a pity it is it cannot be thoroughly organised.

My wife is a little better, but she is terribly shattered.  By the time you come back we shall, I hope, have reverted from our present hospital condition to our normal arrangements, but in any case we shall be glad to see you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The following is, I think, the first reference to his fastidiousness in the literary expression and artistic completeness of his work.  As he said in an after-dinner speech at a meeting in aid of the Literary Fund, “Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.”  Anything that was to be published he subjected to repeated revision.  And thus, apologising to Hooker for his absence, he writes (August 2, 1860):—­]

I was sorry to have to send an excuse by Tyndall the other day, but I found I must finish the Pyrosoma paper, and all last Tuesday was devoted to it, and I fear the next after will have the like fate.

It constantly becomes more and more difficult to me to finish things satisfactorily.

[To Hooker also he writes a few days later:—­]

I hope your ear is better; take care of yourself, there’s a good fellow.  I can’t do without you these twenty years.  We have a devil of a lot to do in the way of smiting the Amalekites.

[Between two men who seldom spoke of their feelings, but let constant intercourse attest them, these words show more than the practical side of their friendship, their community of aims and interests.  Quick, strong-willed, and determined as they both were, the fact that they could work together for over forty years without the shadow of a misunderstanding, presupposes an unusually strong friendship firmly based upon mutual trust and respect as well as liking, the beginning of which Sir J. Hooker thus describes:—­