April 4.

We toil at the Commission every day, and don’t make any rapid progress.  An awful fear creeps over me that we shall not finish this bout.

[While he was in Edinburgh for the third time, his attention was called to an article in the “Echo,” the organ of the anti-vivisection party.  He writes:—­]

The “Echo” is pretty.  It is one of a long series of articles from the same hand, but I don’t think they hurt anybody and they evidently please the writer.  For some reason or other they have not attacked me yet, but I suppose my turn will come.

[Again:—­]

Thank you for sending me John Bright’s speeches.  They are very good, but hardly up to his old mark of eloquence.  Some parts are very touching.

[His health was improving, as he notes with satisfaction:—­]

Every day this week we have had about four hours of the Commission, and I have dined out four days out of the six.  But I’m no the waur, and the late dinners have not been visited by fits of morning blue devils.  So I am in hopes that I am getting back to the normal state that Clark prophesied for me.

4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., April 29, 1877.

My dear Skelton,

Best thanks for your second edition.  You paint the system (i.e. of Scotch education.) in such favourable colours, that I am thinking of taking advantage of it for my horde of “young barbarians.”  I am sure Scotch air would be of service to them—­and in after-life they might have the inestimable advantage of a quasi-Scotch nationality—­that greatest of all practical advantages in Britain.

We are to sit again in the end of July when Mrs. Skelton and you, if you are wise, will be making holiday.

Your invitation is most tempting, and if I had no work to do I should jump at it.

But alas!  I shall have a deal of work, and I must go to my Patmos in George Street.  Ingrained laziness is the bane of my existence; and you don’t suppose that with the sun shining down into your bosky dell, and Mrs. Skelton radiant, and Froude and yourself nicotiant, I am such a Philistine as to do a stroke of work?

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[From Edinburgh he went to St. Andrews to make arrangements for his elder son to go to the University there as a student the following winter.  Then he paid a visit to Sir W. Armstrong in Northumberland, afterwards spending a month at Whitby.  His holiday work consisted in a great part of the article on “Evolution” for the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” which is noted as finished on October 24, though not published till the next year.

In November the honorary degree of LL.D. was conferred upon Charles Darwin at Cambridge,] “a great step for Cambridge, though it may not seem much in itself,” [he writes to Dohrn, November 21.  In the evening after the public ceremony there was a dinner of the Philosophical Club, at which he spoke in praise of Darwin’s services to science.  Darwin himself was unable to be present, but received an enthusiastic account of the proceedings from his son, and wrote to thank Huxley, who replied:—­]