It will startle the Puritans who always coolly put the matter the other way; but it is profoundly true.

These people are for the most part mere idolaters with a Bible-fetish, who urgently stand in need of conversion by Extra-christian Missionaries.

It takes all one’s practical experience of the importance of Puritan ways of thinking to overcome one’s feeling of the unreality of their beliefs.  I had pretty well forgotten how real to them “the man in the next street” is, till your citation of their horribly absurd dogmas reminded me of it.  If you can persuade them that Paul is fairly interpretable in your sense, it may be the beginning of better things, but I have my doubts if Paul would own you, if he could return to expound his own epistles.

I am glad you like my Descartes article.  My business with my scientific friends is something like yours with the Puritans, nature being our Paul.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

26 Abbey Place, May 10, 1870.

[From the 14th to the 24th of April Huxley, accompanied by his friend Hooker, made a trip to the Eifel country.  His sketch-book is full of rapid sketches of the country, many of them geological; one day indeed there are eight, another nine such.

Tyndall was invited to join the party, and at first accepted, but then recollected the preliminaries which had to be carried out before his lectures on electricity at the end of the month.  So he writes on April 6:—­

Royal Institution, 6 April.

My dear Huxley,

I was rendered drunk by the excess of prospective pleasure when you mentioned the Eifel yesterday, and took no account of my lectures.  They begin on the 28th, and I have studiously to this hour excluded them from my thought.  I have made arrangements to see various experiments involving the practical application of electricity before the lectures begin; I find myself, in short, cut off from the expedition.  My regret on this score is commensurable with the pleasures I promised myself.  Confound the lectures!

And yours on Friday is creating a pretty hubbub already. (On the Pedigree of the Horse” April 8, 1870, which was never brought out in book form.) I am torn to pieces by women in search of tickets.  Anything that touches progenitorship interests them.  You will have a crammed house, I doubt not.

Yours ever,

John Tyndall.

Huxley replied:—­]

Geological Survey of England and Wales, April 6, 1870.

My dear Tyndall,

Damn
  the
      L
       e
        c
         t
          u
           r
            e
             s.

T.H.H.

That’s a practical application of electricity for you.

[In June he writes to his wife, who has taken a sick child to the seaside:—­]