great and princely dignity of perfect manhood, which is an order of nobility not inherited, but to be won by each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their fittest use.”) I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of matter.  I dislike them even more than I do the pietists.

Some of these days I shall look up the ape question again, and go over the rest of the organisation in the same way.  But in order to get a thorough grip of the question, I must examine into a good many points for myself.  The results, when they do come out, will, I foresee, astonish the natives.

I am cold-proof, and all the better for the Welsh trip.  To say truth, I was just on the edge of breaking down when I went.  Did I ever send you a letter of mine on the teaching of Natural History?  It was published while you were away, and I forget whether I sent it or not.  However, a copy accompanies this note...

Of course there will be room for your review and welcome.  I have put it down and reckon on it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Huxley returned from the trip to Wales in time to be with his wife for the New Year.  The plot she had made with Dr. Tyndall had been entirely successful.  The threatened breakdown was averted.  Wales in winter was as good as Switzerland.  Of the ascent of Snowdon he writes on December 28:] “Both Tyndall and I voted it under present circumstances as good as most things Alpine.”

[His wife, however, continued in very weak health.  She was prostrated by the loss of her little boy.  So in the middle of March he gladly accepted Mr. Darwin’s invitation for her and the three children to spend a fortnight in the quiet of his house at Down, where he himself managed to run down for a week end.] “It appears to me,” [he writes to his wife,] “that you are subjecting poor Darwin to a savage Tennysonian persecution.  I shall see him looking like a martyr and across talk double science next Sunday.”

[In April another good friend, Dr. Bence Jones, lent the invalid his house at Folkestone for three months.  Unable even to walk when she went there, her recovery was a slow business.  Huxley ran down every week; his brother George and his wife also were frequent visitors.  Meanwhile he resolved to move into a new house, in order that she might not return to a place so full of sorrowful memories.  On May 30 he effected the move to a larger house not half a mile away from Waverley Place—­26 Abbey Place (now 23 Abercorn Place).  Here also Mrs. Heathorn lived for the next year, my grandfather, over seventy as he was, being compelled to go out again to Australia to look after a business venture of his which had come to grief.

Meantime the old house was still on his hands for another year.  Trying to find a tenant, he writes on May 21, 1861:—­]