I fear I must admit that even a Gladstonian paper occasionally tells the truth.  They never mean to, but we all have our lapses from the rule of life we have laid down for ourselves, and must be charitable.

The fact is, I got influenza in the spring, and have never managed to shake right again, any tendency that way being well counteracted by the Romanes lecture and its accompaniments.

So we are off to the Maloja to-morrow.  It mended up the shaky old heart-pump five years ago, and I hope will again.

I have been in Orkney, and believe in the air, but I cannot say quite so much for the scenery.  I thought it just a wee little bit, shall I say, bare?  But then I have a passion for mountains.

I shall be right glad to know what your H.O.M. [The “Old Man of Hoy,” a pseudonym under which Sir J. Skelton wrote.] has to say about Ethics and Evolution.  You must remember that my lecture was a kind of egg-dance.  Good manners bound me over to say nothing offensive to the Christians in the amphitheatre (I was in the arena), and truthfulness, on the other hand, bound me to say nothing that I did not fully mean.  Under these circumstances one has to leave a great many i’s undotted and t’s uncrossed.

Pray remember me very kindly to Mrs. Skelton, and believe me,

Yours ever,

T.H.  Huxley.

[And again on October 17:—­]

Ask your Old Man of Hoy to be so good as to suspend judgment until the Lecture appears again with an appendix in that collection of volumes the bulk of which appals me.

Didn’t I see somewhere that you had been made Poor Law pope, or something of the sort?  I congratulate the poor more than I do you, for it must be a weary business trying to mend the irremediable. (No, I am not glancing at the whitewashing of Mary.)

[Here may be added two later letters bearing in part upon the same subject:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 23, 1894.

Dear Sir,

I ought to have thanked you before now for your letter about Nietzsche’s works, but I have not much working time, and I find letter-writing a burden, which I am always trying to shirk.

I will look up Nietzsche, though I must confess that the profit I obtain from German authors on speculative questions is not usually great.

As men of research in positive science they are magnificently laborious and accurate.  But most of them have no notion of style, and seem to compose their books with a pitchfork.

There are two very different questions which people fail to discriminate.  One is whether evolution accounts for morality, the other whether the principle of evolution in general can be adopted as an ethical principle.

The first, of course, I advocate, and have constantly insisted upon.  The second I deny, and reject all so-called evolutional ethics based upon it.

I am yours faithfully,