I have just asked my children what message they have to send to you, and they send their love; very sorry they won’t see you before you go, and hope you won’t come back speaking through your nose!

I shall be in town this week or next, and therefore shall see you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, September 17, 1872.

My dear Roscoe,

Your letter has followed me from Morthoe here.  We had good enough weather in Devon—­but my stay there was marred by the continuous dyspepsia and concurrent hyperchondriacal incapacity.  At last, I could not stand it any longer, and came home for “change of air,” leaving the wife and chicks to follow next week.  By dint of living on cocoa and Revalenta, and giving up drink, tobacco, and all other things that make existence pleasant, I am getting better.

What was your motive in getting kicked by a horse?  I stopped away from the Association without that; and am not sorry to have been out of the way of the X. business.  What is to become of the association if —­ is to monopolise it?  And then there was that scoundrel, Louis Napoleon—­to whom no honest man ought to speak—­gracing the scene.  I am right glad I was out of it.

I am at my wits’ end to suggest a lecturer for you.  I wish I could offer myself, but I have refused everything of that sort on the score of health; and moreover, I am afraid of my wife!

What do you say to Ramsay?  He lectures very well.  I have done nothing whatever to the Primer.  Stewart sent me Geikie’s letter this morning, and I have asked Macmillan to send Geikie the proofs of my Primer so far as they go.  We must not overlap more than can be helped.

I have not seen Hooker yet since my return.  While all this row has been going on, I could not ask him to do anything for us.  And until X. is dead and d—­d (officially at any rate), I am afraid there will be little peace for him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Please remember me very kindly to Mrs. Roscoe.

[In a letter of September 25 is a reference to the way in which his increasing family had outgrown his house in Abbey Place.  Early in the preceding year, he had come to the decision to buy a small house in the same neighbourhood, and add to it so as to give elbow-room to each and all of the family.  This was against the advice of his friend and legal adviser, to whom he wrote announcing his decision, as follows.  The letter was adorned with a sketch of an absurd cottage, “Ye House!” perched like a windmill on a kind of pedestal, and with members of the family painfully ascending a ladder to the upper story, above the ominous legend, “Staircase forgotten.”]

March 20, 1871.

My dear Burton,

There is something delightfully refreshing in rushing into a piece of practical work in the teeth of one’s legal adviser.