The change here is wonderfully to the good.  We are perched more than a thousand feet above the sea, looking over the Tuscan hills for twenty or thirty miles every way.  It is with them enough sit with the window wide open and yet the air is prior and more bracing than in any place we have visited.  Moreover, the hotel (Grande Albergo) is very comfortable.

Then there is one of the most wonderful cathedrals to be seen in all North Italy—­free from all the gaudy finery and atrocious bad taste which have afflicted me all over South Italy.  The town is the quaintest place imaginable—­built of narrow streets on several steep hills to start with, and then apparently stirred up with a poker to prevent monotony of effect.

Moreover, there is Catherine of Siena, of whom I am reading a delightful Catholic life by an Italian father of the Oratory.  She died 500 years ago, but she was one of twenty-five children, and I think some of them must have settled in Kent and allied themselves with the Heathorns.  Otherwise, I don’t see why her method of writing to the Pope should have been so much like the way my daughters (especially the youngest) write to their holy father.

I wish she had not had the stigmata—­I am afraid there must have been a LEETLE humbug about the business—­otherwise she was a very remarkable person, and you need not be ashamed of the relationship.

I suppose we shall get to Florence some time this week; the address was sent to you before we left Rome—­Hotel Milano, Via Cerretani.  But I am loth to leave this lovely air in which, I do believe, I am going to pick up at last.  The misfortune is that we did not intend to stay here more than three days, and so had letters sent to Florence.  Everybody told us it would be very cold, and, as usual, everybody told taradiddles.

M—­ unites in fondest love to you all.

Ever your loving father,

T.H.  Huxley.

[To his son.]

Siena, February 25, 1885.

...If you had taken to physical science it would have been delightful for me for us to have worked together, and I am half inclined to take to history that I may earn that pleasure.  I could give you some capital wrinkles about the physical geography and prehistoric history (excuse bull) of Italy for a Roman History primer!  Joking apart, I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it a process of evolution—­intelligible to the young.  The Italians have been doing wonders in the last twenty years in prehistoric archaeology, and I have been greatly interested in acquainting myself with the general results of their work.

We moved here last Friday, and only regret that the reports of the weather prevented us from coming sooner.  More than 1000 feet above the sea, in the midst of a beautiful hill country, and with the clearest and purist air we have met with in Italy, Siena is perfectly charming.  The window is wide open and I look out upon a vast panorama, something like that of the Surrey hills, only on a larger scale—­“Raw Siena,” “Burnt Siena,” in the foreground, where the colour of the soil is not hidden by the sage green olive foliage, purple mountains in the distance.