Our best love to you all.

Ever your loving Pater.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, August 26, 1891.

Dearest Babs,

’Pears to me your friend is a squid or pen-and-ink fish, Loligo among the learned.  Probably Loligo media which I have taken in that region.  They have ten tentacles with suckers round their heads, two much longer than the others.  They are close to cuttlefish, but have a thin horny shell inside them instead of the “cuttle-bone.”  If you can get one by itself in a tub of water, it is pretty to see how they blush all over and go pale again, owing to little colour-bags in the skin, which expand and contract.  Doubtless they took you for a heron, under the circumstances [sketch of a wader].

With slight intervals it has been blowing a gale from the west here for some months, the memory of man indeed goeth not back to the calm.  I have not been really warm more than two days this so-called summer.  And everybody prophesied we should be roasted alive here in summer.

We are all flourishing, and send our best love to Jack and you.  Tell
Joyce the wallflowers have grown quite high in her garden.

Ever your loving Pater.

[Politics are not often touched upon in the letters of this period, but an extract from a letter of October 25, 1891, is of interest as giving his reason for supporting a Unionist Government, many of whose tendencies he was far from sympathising with:—­]

The extract from the “Guardian” is wonderful.  The Gladstonian tee-to-tum cannot have many more revolutions to make.  The only thing left for him now, is to turn Agnostic, declare Homer to be an old bloke of a ballad-monger, and agitate for the prohibition of the study of Greek in all universities...

It is just because I do not want to see our children involved in civil war that I postpone all political considerations to keeping up a Unionist Government.

I may be quite wrong; but right or wrong, it is no question of party.  “Rads delight not me nor Tories neither,” as Hamlet does not say.

The following letter to Sir M. Foster shows how little Huxley was now able to do in the way of public business without being knocked up:—­]

Hodeslea, October 20, 1891.

My dear Foster,

If I had known the nature of the proceedings at the College of Physicians yesterday, I should have braved the tedium of listening to a lecture I could not hear in order to see you decorated.  Clark had made a point of my going to the dinner [I.e. at the College of Physicians.], and, worse luck, I had to “say a few words” after it, with the result that I am entirely washed out to-day, and only able to send you the feeblest of congratulations.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The same thing appears in the following to Sir W.H.  Flower, which is also interesting for his opinion on the question of promotion by seniority:—­]