I am wonderfully better, and really feel ashamed of loafing about when I might very well be at work.  But I have promised to make holiday, and make holiday I will.

No proof of your answer to Forbes’ biographer reached me before I left, so I suppose you had not received one in time.  I am dying to see it out.

Hooker is down below, but I take upon myself to send his love.  He is in great force now that he has got rid of his Grenoble mulligrubs.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[After parting company with Hooker, he paid a flying visit to Professor Bonnet at Geneva; then he was joined by his wife and son for the last three weeks of the holiday, which were spent at Baden and in the Bernese Oberland.  Before this, he writes home:—­]

I feel quite a different man from what I was two months ago, and you will say that you have a much more creditable husband than the broken-down old fellow who has been a heart-ache to you so long, when you see me.  The sooner you can get away the better.  If the rest only does you as much good as it does me, I shall be very happy.

Axenstein, Luzerne, August 24, 1873.

My dear Tyndall,

The copies of your booklet ["Principal Forbes and his Biographers.”] intended for Hooker and me reached me just as I left Baden last Tuesday.  Hooker had left me for home a fortnight before, and I hardly know whether to send his to Kew or keep them for him till I return.  I have read mine twice, and I think that nothing could be better than the tone you have adopted.  I did not suspect that you had such a shot in your locker as the answer to Forbes about the direction of the “crevasses” referred to by Rendu.  It is a deadly thrust; and I shall be curious to see what sort of parry the other side will attempt.  For of course they will attempt something.  Scotland is, I believe, the only country in the world in which you can bring in action for “putting to silence” an adversary who will go on with an obviously hopeless suit.  The lawgivers knew the genius of the people; and it is to be regretted that they could not establish a process of the same sort in scientific matters.

I wrote to you a month ago to tell you how we had been getting on in France.  Hooker and I were very jolly, notwithstanding the heat, and I think that the Vivarrais is the most instructive country in the world for seeing what water can do in cutting down the hardest rocks.  Scrope’s book is very good on the whole, though the pictures are a little overdone.

My wife and Leonard met me at Cologne on the 11th.  Then we went on to Baden and rested till last Tuesday, when we journeyed to Luzerne and, getting out of that hot and unsavoury hole as fast as we could, came here last Thursday.