(Nimm dann Fuhrmann,
  Nimm die Miethe
  Die Ich gerne dreifach biete;
  Zwei, die eben uberfuhren
  Waren geistige Naturen.)

The peculiar constitution of the club scarcely seemed to admit of new members; not, at all events, without altering the unique relation of friendship joined to common experience of struggle and success which had lasted so long.  After the death of Spottiswoode and Busk, and the ill-health of other members, the election of new members was indeed mooted, but the proposal was ultimately negatived.  Huxley’s opinion on this point appears from letters to Sir E. Frankland in 1886 and to Sir J.D.  Hooker in 1888.]

As for the filling up the vacancies in the x, I am disposed to take Tyndall’s view of the matter.  Our little club had no very definite object beyond preventing a few men who were united by strong personal sympathies from drifting apart by the pressure of busy lives.

Nobody could have foreseen or expected twenty odd years ago when we first met, that we were destined to play the parts we have since played, and it is in the nature of things impossible that any of the new members proposed (much as we may like and respect them all), can carry on the work which has so strangely fallen to us.

An axe with a new head and a new handle may be the same axe in one sense, but it is not the familiar friend with which one has cut one’s way through wood and brier.

[And in the other letter:—­]

What with the lame dog condition of Tyndall and Hirst and Spencer and my own recurrent illnesses, the x is not satisfactory.  But I don’t see that much will come from putting new patches in.  The x really has no raison d’etre beyond the personal attachment of its original members.  Frankland told me of the names that had been mentioned, and none could be more personally welcome to me...but somehow or other they seem out of place in the x.

However, I am not going to stand out against the general wish, and I shall agree to anything that is desired.

[Again:—­]

The club has never had any purpose except the purely personal object of bringing together a few friends who did not want to drift apart.  It has happened that these cronies had developed into big-wigs of various kinds, and therefore the club has incidentally—­I might say accidentally—­had a good deal of influence in the scientific world.  But if I had to propose to a man to join, and he were to say, Well, what is your object?  I should have to reply like the needy knife-grinder, “Object, God bless you, sir, we’ve none to show.”

[As he wrote elsewhere (loc. cit.):—­]

Later on, there were attempts to add other members, which at last became wearisome, and had to be arrested by the agreement that no proposition of that kind should be entertained, unless the name of the new may be suggested contained all the consonants absent from the names of the old ones.  In the lack of Slavonic friends this decision put an end to the possibility of increase.