You know, I daresay, that Mr. William Rathbone, then M.P. for Liverpool, once proposed to your father to be the companion of my first Indian journey in 1874-5, he, William Rathbone, paying all your father’s expenses. (Of this, Dr. Tyndall wrote to Mrs. Huxley:—­“I want to tell you a pleasant conversation I had last night with Jodrell.  He and a couple more want to send Hal with Grant Duff to India, taking charge of his duties here and of all necessities ghostly and bodily there!”) Mr. Rathbone made this proposal when he found that Lubbock, with whom I travelled a great deal at that period of my life, was unable to go with me to India.  How I wish your father had said “Yes.”  My journey, as it was, turned out most instructive and delightful; but to have lived five months with a man of his extraordinary gifts would have been indeed a rare piece of good fortune, and I should have been able also to have contributed to the work upon which you are engaged a great many facts which would have been of interest to your readers.  You will, however, I am sure, take the will for the deed, and believe me, very sincerely yours,

M.E.  Grant Duff.]

CHAPTER 2.2.

1871.

["In 1871” (to quote Sir M. Foster), “the post of Secretary to the Royal Society became vacant through the resignation of William Sharpey, and the Fellows learned with glad surprise that Huxley, whom they looked to rather as a not distant President, was willing to undertake the duties of the office.”  This office, which he held until 1880, involved him for the next ten years in a quantity of anxious work, not only in the way of correspondence and administration, but the seeing through the press and often revising every biological paper that the Society received, as well as reading those it rejected.  Then, too, he had to attend every general, council, and committee meeting, amongst which latter the “Challenger” Committee was a load in itself.  Under pressure of all this work, he was compelled to give up active connection with other learned societies. (See Appendix 2.)

Other work this year, in addition to the School Board, included courses of lectures at the London Institution in January and February, on “First Principles of Biology,” and from October to December on “Elementary Physiology”; lectures to Working Men in London from February to April, as well as one at Liverpool, March 25, on “The Geographical Distribution of Animals”; two lectures at the Royal Institution, May 12 and 19, on “Berkeley on Vision,” and the “Metaphysics of Sensation” ("Collected Essays” 6).  He published one paleontological paper, “Fossil Vertebrates from the Yarrow Colliery” (Huxley and Wright, “Irish Academy Transactions").  In June and July he gave 36 lectures to schoolmasters—­that important business of teaching the teachers that they might set about scientific instruction in the right way. (See below.) He attended the British Association at