With you I envy Francis his gastric energies.  I feel I have done for myself in that line, and am in for a life-long dyspeps.  I have not, now, nervous energy enough for stomach and brain both, and if I work the latter, not even the fresh breezes of this place will keep the former in order.  That is a discovery I have made here, and though highly instructive, it is not so pleasant as some other physiological results that have turned up.

Chapman, who died of cholera, was a distant relative of my man.  The poor fellow vanished in the middle of an unfinished article, which has appeared in the last “Westminster,” as his forlorn vale! to the world.  After all, that is the way to die, better a thousand times than drivelling off into eternity betwixt awake and asleep in a fatuous old age.

Believe me, ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[On Tyndall consenting, he wrote again on the 29th:—­]

I rejoice in having got you to put your head under my yoke, and feel ready to break into a hand gallop on the strength of it.

I have written to Chapman to tell him you only make an experiment on your cerebral substance—­whose continuance depends on tenacity thereof.

I didn’t suspect you of being seduced by the magnificence of the emolument, you Cincinnatus of the laboratory.  I only suggested that as pay sweetens labour, a fortiori it will sweeten what to you will be no labour.

I’m not a miserable mortal now—­quite the contrary.  I never am when I have too much to do, and my sage reflection was not provoked by envy of the more idle.  Only I do wish I could sometimes ascertain the exact juste milieu of work which will suit, not my head or will, these can’t have too much; but my absurd stomach.

[The Edinburgh candidature, the adoption of his wider scheme for the carrying out of the coast survey, and his approaching marriage, are touched upon in the following letters to Dr. Frederick Dyster of Tenby, whose keen interest in marine zoology was the starting-point of a warm friendship with the rising naturalist, some fifteen years his junior.  (It was to Dyster that Huxley owed his introduction in 1854 to F.D.  Maurice (whose work in educating the people he did his best to help), and later to Charles Kingsley, whom he first met at the end of June 1855.] “What Kingsley do you refer to?” [he writes on May 6,] “Alton Locke Kingsley or Photographic Kingsley?  I shall be right glad to find good men and true anywhere, and I will take your bail for any man.  But the work must be critically done.”) [He was strongly urged by the younger man to complete and systematise his observations by taking in turn all the species of each genus of annelids found at Tenby, and working them up into a series of little monographs] “which would be the best of all possible foundations for a History of the British Annelidae":—­

To Dr. Dyster.

January 5, 1855