If not there will be an awful row, and I for one will show no mercy.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The foundation of the x Club towards the earth 1864 was a notable event for Huxley and his circle of scientific friends.  It was growing more and more difficult for them to see one another except now and again at meetings of the learned societies, and even that was quite uncertain.  The pressure of Huxley’s own work may be inferred from his letters at this time (especially to Darwin, July 2, 1863, and January 16, 1864).  Not only society, but societies had to be almost entirely given up.  Moreover, the distance from one another at which some of these friends lived, added another difficulty, so that Huxley writes to Hooker in his] “remote province” [of Kew:] “I wonder if we are ever to meet again in this world.” [Accordingly in January 1864, Hooker gladly embraced a proposal of Huxley’s to organise some kind of regular meeting, a proposal which bore fruit in the establishment of the x Club.  On November 3, 1864, the first meeting was held at St. George’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, where they resolved to dine regularly “except when Benham cannot have us, in which case dine at the Athenaeum.”  In the latter eighties, however, the Athenaeum became the regular place of meeting, and it was here that the “coming of age” of the club was celebrated in 1885.

Eight members met at the first meeting; the second meeting brought their numbers up to nine by the addition of W. Spottiswoode, but the proposal to elect a tenth member was never carried out.  On the principle of lucus a non lucendo, this lent an additional appropriateness to the symbol x, the origin of which Huxley thus describes in his reminiscences of Tyndall in the “Nineteenth Century” for January 1894:—­]

At starting, our minds were terribly exercised over the name and constitution of our society.  As opinions on this grave matter were no less numerous than the members—­indeed more so—­we finally accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the x Club; and the proposal of some genius among us, that we should have no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by acclamation.

[Besides Huxley, the members of the club were as follows:—­

George Busk, F.R.S. (1807-87), then secretary of the Linnean Society, a skilful anatomist. (He served as surgeon to the hospital ship “Dreadnought” at Greenwich till 1856, when he resigned and, retiring from practice, devoted himself to scientific pursuits, and was elected President of the College of Surgeons in 1871.)

Edward Frankland (1825-1899), Foreign Secretary R.S., K.C.B., then Professor of Chemistry in the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the Royal College of Science.

Thomas Archer Hirst, F.R.S., then mathematical master at University College School. (In 1865 appointed Professor of Physics; in 1867, of Pure Mathematics, at University College, London; and from 1873 to 1883 Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich; an old Marburg student, and intimate friend of Tyndall, whom he had succeeded at Queenwood College in 1853.  He died in 1892.)