Prescription:  Ammoniae Carbonatis
              Sodae Phosphatis
              Aquae destillatae
                 quantum sufficit
              Caloris 150 degrees Centigrade
              Vacui perfectissimi
              Patientiae.

Transubstantiation will be nothing to this if it turns out to be true, and you may go and tell your neighbour Januarius to shut up his shop as the heretics mean to outbid him.

Now I think that the best service I can render to all you enterprising young men is to turn devil’s advocate, and do my best to pick holes in your work.

By the way, Miklucho-Maclay has been here; I have seen a good deal of him, and he strikes me as a man of very considerable capacity and energy.  He was to return to Jena to-day.

My friend Herbert Spencer will be glad to learn that you appreciate his book.  I have been his devil’s advocate for a number of years, and there is no telling how many brilliant speculations I have been the means of choking in an embryonic state.

My wife does not know that I am writing to you, or she would say apropos of your last paragraph that you are an entirely unreasonable creature in your notions of how friendship should be manifested, and that you make no allowances for the oppression and exhaustion of the work entailed by what Jean Paul calls a “Tochtervolles Haus.”  I hope I may live to see you with at least ten children, and then my wife and I will be avenged.  Our children will be married and settled by that time, and we shall have time to write every day and get very wroth when you do not reply immediately.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

All are well, the children so grown you will not know them.

July 18, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

Notwithstanding the severe symptoms of “Tochterkrankheit” under which
I labour, I find myself equal to reply to your letter.

The British Association meets in September on the 14th day of that month, which falls on a Wednesday.  Of course, if you come you shall be provided for by the best specimen of Liverpool hospitality.  We have ample provision for the entertainment of the “distinguished foreigner.”

Will you be so good as to be my special ambassador with Haeckel and Gegenbauer, and tell them the same thing?  It would give me and all of us particular pleasure to see them and to take care of them.

But I am afraid that this wretched war will play the very deuce with our foreign friends.  If you Germans do not give that crowned swindler, whose fall I have been looking for ever since the coup d’etat, such a blow as he will never recover from, I will never forgive you.  Public opinion in England is not worth much, but at present, it is entirely against France.  Even the “Times,” which generally contrives to be on the baser side of a controversy, is at present on the German side.  And my daughters announced to me yesterday that they had converted a young friend of theirs from the French to the German side, which is one gained for you.  All look forward with great pleasure to seeing you in the autumn.