I am almost ashamed to be well and tolerably active when young and old friends are being thus prostrated.

However, you have youth on your side, so do not give up, and wearisome as doing nothing may be, persist in it as the best of medicines.

At my time of life one should be always ready to stand at attention when the order to march comes; but for the rest I think it well to go on doing what I can, as if F. M. General Death had forgotten me.  That must account for my seeming presumption in thinking I may some day “take up the threads” of late evolutionary speculation.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

My wife joins with me in love and kind wishes to you both.

[At the request of his friends, Huxley wrote for the “Nineteenth Century” a brief appreciation of his old comrade Tyndall—­the tribute of a friend to a friend—­and, difficult task though it was, touched on the closing scene, if only from a chivalrous desire to do justice to the long devotion which accident had so cruelly wronged:—­]

I am comforted [he writes to Sir J. Hooker on January 3] by your liking the Tyndall article.  You are quite right, I shivered over the episode of the “last words,” but it struck me as the best way of getting justice done to her, so I took a header.  I am glad to see by the newspaper comments that it does not seem to have shocked other people’s sense of decency.

[The funeral took place on Saturday, December 9.  There was no storm nor fog to make the graveside perilous for the survivors.  In the Haslemere churchyard the winter sun shone its brightest, and the moorland air was crisp with an almost Alpine freshness as this lover of the mountains was carried to his last resting-place.  But though he took no outward harm from that bright still morning, Huxley was greatly shaken by the event]:  “I was very much used up,” [he writes to Sir M. Foster on his return home two days later], “to my shame be it said, far more than my wife”; [and on December 30 to Sir John Donnelly:—­]

Your kind letter deserved better than to have been left all this time without response, but the fact is, I came to grief the day after Christmas Day (no, we did not indulge in too much champagne).  Lost my voice, and collapsed generally, without any particular reason, so I went to bed and stayed there as long as I could stand it, and now I am picking up again.  The fact is, I suppose I had been running up a little account over poor old Tyndall.  One does not stand that sort of wear and tear so well as one gets ancient.

[On the same day he writes to Sir J.D.  Hooker:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, December 30, 1893.

My dear Hooker,

You gave the geographers some uncommonly sane advice.  I observe that the words about the “stupendous ice-clad mountains” you saw were hardly out of your mouth when —­ coolly asserts that the Antarctic continent is a table-land! “comparatively level country.”  It really is wrong that men should be allowed to go about loose who fill you with such a strong desire to kick them as that little man does.