Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

P.S.

I wrote some weeks ago to the Secretary of the National Association of Science Teachers to say that I must give up the Presidency.  I had come to the conclusion that the Association wants sharp looking after, and that I can’t undertake that business.

P.S. 2.

Shall I tell you what your great affliction henceforward will be?  It will be to hear yourself called Sr’enery Roscoe by the flunkies who announce you.

Her Ladyship will please take note of this crumpled rose leaf—­I am sure of its annoying her.

[The following letter, with its comparison of life to a whirlpool and its acknowledgment of the widespread tendency in mankind to make idols, was written in answer to some inquiries from Lady Welby:—­]

April 8, 1884.

Your letter requires consideration, and I have had very little leisure lately.  Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I apprehend, a question of conditions.  A whirlpool in a stream may remain in the same spot for any imaginable time.  Yet it is the effect of the motion of the particles of the water in that spot which continually integrate themselves into the whirlpool and disintegrate themselves from it.  The whirlpool is permanent while the conditions last, though its constituents incessantly change.  Living bodies are just such whirlpools.  Matter sets into them in the shape of food,—­sets out of them in the shape of waste products.  Their individuality lies in the constant maintenance of a characteristic form, not in the preservation of material identity.  I do not know anything about “vitality” except as a name for certain phenomena like “electricity” or “gravitation.”  As you get deeper into scientific questions you will find that “Name ist Schall und Rauch” even more emphatically than Faust says it is in Theology.  Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions “Force,” “Gravity,” “Vitality,” which our own brains have created.  I do not know anything about “inert” things in nature.  If we reduce the world to matter and motion, the matter is not “inert,” inasmuch as the same amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways.  To go back to my own illustration.  The fabric of the watch is not inert, every particle of it is in violent and rapid motion, and the winding-up simply perturbs the whole infinitely complicated system in a particular fashion.  Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession of changes, while a changing equilibrium is a contradiction in terms.  I am not at all clear that a living being is comparable to a machine running down.  On this side of the question the whirlpool affords a better parallel than the watch.  If you dam the stream above or below, the whirlpool dies; just as the living being does if you cut off its food, or choke it with its own waste products.  And if you alter the sides or bottom of the stream you may kill the whirlpool, just as you kill the animal by interfering with its structure.  Heat and oxidation as a source of heat appear to supply energy to the living machine, the molecular structure of the germ furnishing the “sides and bottom of the stream,” that is, determining the results which the energy supplied shall produce.