T.H.  Huxley.

[August and September, as said above, were spent in England, though with little good effect.  Filey was not a success for either himself or his wife.  Bournemouth, where they joined their eldest daughter and her family, offered a] “temperature much more to the taste of both of us,” [and at least undid the mischief done by the wet and cold of the north.

The mean line of health was gradually rising; it was a great relief to be free at length from administrative distractions, while the retiring pensions removed the necessity of daily toil.  By nature he was like the friend whom he described as] “the man to become hipped to death without incessant activity of some sort or other.  I am sure that the habit of incessant work into which we all drift is as bad in its way as dram-drinking.  In time you cannot be comfortable without the stimulus.” [But the variety of interests which filled his mind prevented him from feeling the void of inaction after a busy life.  And just as he was at the turning-point in health, he received a fillip which started him again into vigorous activity—­the mental tonic bracing up his body and clearing away the depression and languor which had so long beset him.

The lively fillip came in the shape of an article in the November “Nineteenth Century,” by Mr. Gladstone, in which he attacked the position taken up by Dr. Reville in his “Prolegomena to the History of Religions,” and in particular, attempted to show that the order of creation given in Genesis 1, is supported by the evidence of science.  This article, Huxley used humorously to say, so stirred his bile as to set his liver right at once; and though he denied the soft impeachment that the ensuing fight was what had set him up, the marvellous curative effects of a Gladstonian dose, a remedy unknown to the pharmacopoeia, became a household word among family and friends.

His own reply, “The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature,” appeared in the December number of the “Nineteenth Century” ("Collected Essays” 4 page 139).  In January 1886 Mr. Gladstone responded with his “Proem to Genesis,” which was met in February by “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis” ("Collected Essays” 4 page 164).  Not only did he show that science offers no support to the “fourfold” or the “fivefold” or any other order obtained from Genesis by Mr. Gladstone, but in a note appended to his second article he gives what he takes to be the proper sense of the “Mosaic” narrative of the Creation (4 page 195), not allowing the succession of phenomena to represent an evolutionary notion, as suggested, of a progress from lower to higher in the scale of being, a notion assuredly not in the mind of the writer, but deducing this order from such ideas as, putting aside our present knowledge of nature, we may reasonably believe him to have held.