Somebody has sent me the two numbers of Scribner with Blauvelt’s articles on “Modern Skepticism.”  They seem to be very well done, and he has a better appreciation of the toughness of the job before him than any of the writers of his school with whom I have met.  But it is rather cool of you to talk of his pitching into Spencer when you are chief target yourself.  I come in only par parenthese, and I am glad to see that people are beginning to understand my real position, and to separate me from such raging infidels as you and Spencer.

Ever thine,

T.H.  Huxley.

[He was unable to attend the opening of Owens College this autumn, and having received but a scanty account of the proceedings, wrote as follows:—­]

4 Marlborough Place, London, N.W., October 16, 1873.

My dear Roscoe,

I consider myself badly used.  Nobody has sent me a Manchester paper with the proceedings of the day of inauguration, when, I hear, great speeches were made.

I did get two papers containing your opening lecture, and the “Fragment of a Morality,” for which I am duly grateful, but two copies of one days’ proceedings are not the same thing as one copy of two days’ proceedings, and I consider it is very disrespectful to a Governor (large G) not to let him know what went on.

By all accounts which have reached me it was a great success, and I congratulate you heartily.  I only wish that I could have been there to see.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The autumn brought a slow improvement in health—­]

I am travelling [he writes] between the two stations of dyspepsia and health thus [illustrated by a zigzag with “mean line ascending”.

[The sympathy of the convalescent appears in various letters to friends who were ill.  Thus, in reply to Mr. Hyde Clarke, the philologist and, like himself, a member of the Ethnological Society, he writes:—­]

November 18, 1873.

I am glad to learn two things from your note—­first, that you are getting better; second, that there is hope of some good coming out of that Ashantee row, if only in the shape of rare vocables.

My attention is quite turned away from Anthropological matters at present, but I will bear your question in mind if opportunity offers.

[A letter to Professor Rolleston at Oxford gives a lively account of his own ailments, which could only have been written by one now recovering from them, while the illness of another friend raised a delicate point of honour, which he laid before the judgment of Mr. Darwin, more especially as the latter had been primarily concerned in the case.]

4 Marlborough Place, October 16, 1873.

My dear Rolleston,

A note which came from Mrs. Rolleston to my wife the other day, kindly answering some inquiries of ours about the Oxford Middle Class Examination, gave us but a poor account of your health.