[After the death, in February 1892, of Hirst, a most devoted supporter of the club, who “would, I believe, represent it in his sole person rather than pass the day over,” only one more meeting took place, in the following month.  With five of the six survivors domiciled far from town, meeting after meeting fell through, until the treasurer wrote, “My idea is that it is best to let it die out unobserved, and say nothing about its decease to anyone.”

Thus it came to pass that the March meeting of the club in 1893 remained its last.  No ceremony ushered it out of existence.  Its end exemplified a saying of Sir J. Hooker’s “At our ages clubs are an anachronism.”  It had met 240 times, yet, curious to say, although the average attendance up to 1883 was seven out of nine, the full strength of the club only met on twenty-seven occasions.

CHAPTER 1.19.

1865.

[The progress of the American civil war suggested to Huxley in 1865 the text for an article, “Emancipation, Black and White,” the emancipation of the negro in America and the emancipation of women in England, which appeared in the “Reader” of May 20 ("Collected Essays” 3 66).  His main argument for the emancipation of the negro was that already given in his letter to his sister; namely, that in accordance with the moral law that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.  And just as the negro will never take the highest places in civilisation yet need not to be confined to the lowest, so, he argues, it will be with women.] “Nature’s old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected,” [although] “whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys justifies its application to girls as well.”

[With this may be compared his letter to the “Times” of July 8, 1874 (Chapter 28).

No scientific monographs were published in 1865 by Huxley, but his lectures of the previous winter to working-men on “The various Races of Mankind” are an indication of his continued interest in Ethnology, which, set going, as has been said, by the promise to revise the woodcuts for Lyell’s book, found expression in such papers as the “Human Remains in the Shell Mounds,” 1863; the “Neanderthal Remains” of 1864; the “Methods and Results of Ethnology” of 1865; his Fullerian Lectures of 1866-67; papers on “Two Widely Contrasted Forms of the Human Cranium” of 1866 and 1868; the “Patagonian Skulls” of 1868; and “Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology” of 1871:—­