What with one thing and another, I have almost forgotten to answer your note—­and first, as to the business matter...Next as to my own private affairs, the youngster is “a swelling wisibly,” and my wife is getting on better than I hoped, though not quite so well as I could have wished.  The boy’s advent is a great blessing to her in all ways.  For myself I hardly know yet whether it is pleasure or pain.  The ground has gone from under my feet once, and I hardly know how to rest on anything again.  Irrational, you will say, but nevertheless natural.  And finally as to your resolutions, my holy pilgrim, they will be kept about as long as the resolutions of other anchorites who are thrown into the busy world, or I won’t say that, for assuredly you will take the world “as coolly as you can,” and so shall I. But that coolness amounts to the red heat of properly constructed mortals.

It is no use having any false modesty about the matter.  You and I, if we last ten years longer, and you by a long while first, will be the representatives of our respective lines in this country.  In that capacity we shall have certain duties to perform to ourselves, to the outside world, and to science.  We shall have to swallow praise which is no great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous basting and irritations, which will involve a good deal of unquestionable pain.  Don’t flatter yourself that there is any moral chloroform by which either you or I can render ourselves insensible or acquire the habit of doing things coolly.  It is assuredly of no great use to tear one’s self to pieces before one is fifty.  But the alternative, for men constructed on the high pressure tubular boiler principle, like ourselves, is to lie still and let the devil have his own way.  And I will be torn to pieces before I am forty sooner than see that.

I have been privately trading on my misfortunes in order to get a little peace and quietness for a few months.  If I can help it I don’t mean to do any dining out this winter, and I have cut down Societies to the minimum of the Geological, from which I cannot get away.

But it won’t do to keep this up too long.  By and by one must drift into the stream again, and then there is nothing for it but to pull like mad unless we want to be run down by every collier.

I am going to do one sensible thing, however, viz. to rush down to Llanberis with Busk between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day and get my lungs full of hill-air for the coming session.

I was at Down on Saturday and saw Darwin.  He seems fairly well, and his daughter was up and looks better than I expected to see her.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Meanwhile, he took the opportunity to make the child’s birth a new link with his old friend, and wrote as follows :—­]

14 Waverley Place, January 3, 1861.

My dear Hooker,