This kind of thing won’t do, you know.  Here is —­ ill, and I doing all I can to persuade him to go away and take care of himself, and now comes ill news of you.

Is it dyspeps again?  If so follow in my steps.  I mean to go about the country, with somebody who can lecture, as the “horrid example”—­cured.  Nothing but gross and disgusting intemperance, Sir, was the cause of all my evil.  And now that I have been a teetotaller for nine months, and have cut down my food supply to about half of what I used to eat, the enemy is beaten.

I have carried my own permissive bill, and no canteen (except for my friends who still sit in darkness) is allowed on the premises.  And as this is the third letter I have written before breakfast (a thing I never could achieve in the days when I wallowed in the stye of Epicurus), you perceive that I am as vigorous as ever I was in my life.

Let me have news of you, and believe me,

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Athenaeum Club, November 3, 1873.

My dear Darwin,

You will have heard (in fact I think I mentioned the matter when I paid you my pleasant visit the other day) that —­ is ill and obliged to go away for six months to a warm climate.  It is a great grief to me, as he is a man for whom I have great esteem and affection, apart from his high scientific merits, and his symptoms are such as cause very grave anxiety.  I shall be happily disappointed if that accursed consumption has not got hold of him.

The college authorities have behaved as well as they possibly could to him, and I do not suppose that his enforced retirement for a while gives him the least pecuniary anxiety, as his people are all well off, and he himself has an income apart from his college pay.  Nevertheless, under such circumstances, a man with half a dozen children always wants all the money he can lay hands on; and whether he does or no, he ought not to be allowed to deprive himself of any, which leads me to the gist of my letter.  His name was on your list as one of those hearty friends who came to my rescue last year, and it was the only name which made me a little uneasy, for I doubted whether it was right for a man with his responsibilities to make sacrifices of this sort.  However, I stifled that feeling, not seeing what else I could do without wounding him.  But now my conscience won’t let me be, and I do not think that any consideration ought to deter me from getting his contribution back to him somehow or other.  There is no one to whose judgment on a point of honour I would defer more readily than yours, and I am quite sure you will agree with me.  I really am quite unhappy and ashamed to think of myself as vigorous and well at the expense of his denying himself any rich man’s caprice he might take a fancy to.

So, my dear, good friend, let me know what his contribution was, that I may get it back to him somehow or other, even if I go like Nicodemus privily and by night to his bankers.