I trust you have not been very wroth with me for my long delay in answering your last letter.  For the last six weeks I have been very busy lecturing daily to a batch of schoolmasters, and looking after their practical instruction in the laboratory which the Government has, at last, given me.  In the “intervals of business” I have been taking my share in a battle which has been raging between my friend Hooker of Kew and his official chief...and moreover I have just had strength enough to get my daily work done and no more, and everything that could be put off has gone to the wall.  Three days ago, the “Happy Family,” bag and baggage, came to this remote corner, where I propose to take a couple of months’ entire rest—­and put myself in order for next winter’s campaign.  It is a little village five miles from the nearest town (which is Ilfracombe), and our house is at the head of a ravine running down to the sea.  Our backs are turned to England and our faces to America with no land that I know of between.  The country about is beautiful, and if you will come we will put you up at the little inn, and show you something better than even Swanage.  There are slight difficulties about the commissariat, but that is the Hausfrau’s business, and not mine.  At the worst, bread, eggs, milk, and rabbits are certain, and the post from London takes two days!

Morthoe, Ilfracombe, North Devon, August 23, 1872.

My dear Whirlwind,

I promise you all my books, past, present, and to come for the Aquarium.  The best part about them is that they will not take up much room.  Ask for Owen’s by all means; “Fas est etiam ab hoste doceri.”  I am very glad you have got the British Association publications, as it will be a good precedent for the Royal Society.

Have you talked to Hooker about marine botany?  He may be able to help you as soon as X. the accursed (may jackasses sit upon his grandmother’s grave, as we say in the East) leaves him alone.

It is hateful that you should be in England without seeing us, and for the first time I lament coming here.  The children howled in chorus when they heard that you could not come.  At this moment the whole tribe and their mother have gone to the sea, and I must answer your letter before the post goes out, which it does here about half an hour after it comes in.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[In 1872 Huxley was at length enabled to establish in his regular classes a system of science teaching based upon laboratory work by the students, which he had long felt to be the only true method.  It involved the verification of every fact by each student, and was a training in scientific method even more than in scientific fact.  Had circumstances only permitted, the new epoch in biological teaching might have been antedated by many years.  But, as he says in the preface to the “Practical Biology,” 1875:—­]

Practical work was forbidden by the limitations of space in the building in Jermyn Street, which possessed no room applicable to the purpose of a laboratory, and I was obliged to content myself, for many years, with what seemed the next best thing, namely, as full an exposition as I could give of the characters of certain plants and animals, selected as types of vegetable and animal organisation, by way of introduction to systematic zoology and paleontology.