I will do for you, and gladly, anything I would do for myself, but I could not apply on my own behalf to any of those rich countrymen of mine, unless they were personally well known to me, and I had the opportunity of feeling my way with them.  But if you are disposed to apply to any of the people you mention, I shall be only too glad to back your application with all the force I am master of.  You may make use of my name to any extent as guarantor of the scientific value and importance of your undertaking and refer any one to whom you may apply to me.  It may be, in fact, that this is all you want, but as you have taken to the caprice of writing in my tongue instead of in that vernacular, idiomatic and characteristically Dohrnian German in which I delight, I am not so sure about your meaning.  There is a rub for you.  If you write to me in English again I will send the letter back without paying the postage.

In any case let me have a precise statement of your financial position.  I may have a chance of talking to some Croesus, and the first question he is sure to ask me is—­How am I to know that this is a stable affair, and that I am not throwing my money into the sea?...

[Referring to an unpleasant step it seemed necessary to take]...you must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences.  No good is ever done in this world by hesitation...

I hope you are physically better.  Look sharply after your diet, take exercise and defy the blue-devils, and you will weather the storm.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Tyndall, who had not attended the 1873 meeting of the British Association, had heard that some local opposition had been offered to his election as President for the Belfast meeting in 1874, and had written:—­

I wish to have an you had not persuaded me to accept that Belfast duty.  They do not want me...but Spottiswoode assures me that no individual offered the slightest support to the two unscientific persons who showed opposition.

The following was written in reply:—­]

4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1873.

My dear Tyndall,

I am sure you are mistaken about the Belfast people.  That blundering idiot of —­ wanted to make himself important and get up a sort of “Home Rule” agitation in the Association, but nobody backed him and he collapsed.  I am at your disposition for whatever you want me to do, as you know, and I am sure Hooker is of the same mind.  We shall not be ashamed when we meet our enemies in the gate.

The grace of god cannot entirely have deserted you since you are aware of the temperature of that ferocious epistle.  Reeks [The late Trenham Reeks, Registrar of the School of Mines, and Curator of the Museum of Practical Geology.], whom I saw yesterday, was luxuriating in it, and said (confound his impudence) that it was quite my style.  I forgot to tell him, by the bye, that I had resigned in your favour ever since the famous letter to Carpenter.  Well, so long as you are better after it there is no great harm done.