I entirely sympathise with your feeling about the attack on George.  If anybody tries that on with my boy L., the old wolf will show all the fangs he has left by that time, depend upon it...

You ought to be like one of the blessed gods of Elysium, and let the inferior deities do battle with the infernal powers.  Moreover, the severest and most effectual punishment for this sort of moral assassination is quietly to ignore the offender and give him the cold shoulder.  He knows why he gets it, and society comes to know why, and though society is more or less of a dunderhead, it has honourable instincts, and the man in the cold finds no cloak that will cover him.

CHAPTER 2.6.

1875-1876.

[In the year 1875 the bitter agitation directed against experimental physiology came to a head.  It had existed in England for several years.  In 1870, when President of the British Association, Huxley had been violently attacked for speaking in defence of Brown Sequard, the French physiologist.  The name of vivisection, indifferently applied to all experiments on animals, whether carried out by the use of the knife or not, had, as Dr. (afterwards Sir) William Smith put it, the opposite effect on many minds to that of the “blessed word Mesopotamia.”  Misrepresentation was rife even among the most estimable and well-meaning of the opponents of vivisection, because they fancied they saw traces of the practice everywhere, all the more, perhaps, for not having sufficient technical knowledge for proper discrimination.  One of the most flagrant instances of this kind of thing was a letter in the “Record” charging Huxley with advocating vivisections before children, if not by them.  Passages from the Introduction to his “Elementary Physiology,” urging that beginners should be shown the structures under discussion, examples for which could easily be provided from the domestic animals, were put side by side with later passages in the book, such, for instance, as statements of fact as to the behaviour of severed nerves under irritation.  A sinister inference was drawn from this combination, and published as fact without further verification.  Of this he remarks emphatically in his address on “Elementary Instruction in Physiology,” 1877 ("Collected Essays” 3 300):]

It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to give a formal contradiction to the silly fiction, which is assiduously circulated by the fanatics who not only ought to know, but do know, that their assertions are untrue, that I have advocated the introduction of that experimental discipline which is absolutely indispensable to the professed physiologist, into elementary teaching.

[Moreover, during the debates on the Vivisection Bill in 1876, the late Lord Shaftesbury made use of this story.  Huxley was extremely indignant, and wrote home:—­]

Did you see Lord Shaftesbury’s speech in Tuesday’s “Times?” I saw it by chance, and have written a sharp letter to the “Times.” [(Being in Edinburgh, he had been reading the Scotch papers, and] “the reports of the Scotch papers as to what takes place in Parliament are meagre.”)