To Sir J.D.  Hooker.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, December 4, 1894.

My dear old Man,

See the respect I have for your six years’ seniority!  I wished you had been at the dinner, but was glad you were not.  Especially as next morning there was a beastly fog, out of which I bolted home as fast as possible.

I shall have to give up these escapades.  They knock me up for a week afterwards.  And really it is a pity, just as I have got over my horror of public speaking, and find it very amusing.  But I suppose I should gravitate into a bore as old fellows do, and so it is as well I am kept out of temptation.

I will try to remember what I said at the “Nature” dinner.  I scolded the young fellows pretty sharply for their slovenly writing. [A brief report of this speech is to be found in the “British Medical Journal” for December 8, 1894, page 1262.]

There will be a tenth volume of Essays some day, and an Index rerum.  Do you remember how you scolded me for being too speculative in my maiden lecture on Animal Individuality forty odd years ago?  “On revient toujours,” or, to put it another way, “The dog returns to his etc. etc.”

So I am deep in philosophy, grovelling through Diogenes Laertius—­Plutarch’s “Placita” and sich—­and often wondering whether the schoolmasters have any better ground for maintaining that Greek is a finer language than English than the fact that they can’t write the latter dialect.

So far as I can see, my faculties are as good (including memory for anything that is not useful) as they were fifty years ago, but I can’t work long hours, or live out of fresh air.  Three days of London bowls me over.

I expect you are in much the same case.  But you seem to be able to stoop over specimens in a way impossible to me.  It is that incapacity has made me give up dissection and microscopic work.  I do a lot on my back, and I can tell you that the latter posture is an immense economy of strength.  Indeed, when my heart was troublesome, I used to spend my time either in active outdoor exercise or horizontally.

The Stracheys were here the other day, and it was a great pleasure to us to see them.  I think he has had a very close shave with that accident.  There is nobody whom I should more delight to honour—­a right good man all round—­but I am not competent to judge of his work.  You are, and I do not see why you should not suggest it.  I would give him a medal for being R. Strachey, but probably the Council would make difficulties.

By the way, do you see the “Times” has practically climbed down about the Royal Society—­came down backwards like a bear, growling all the time?  I don’t think we shall have any more first of December criticisms.

Lord help you through all this screed.  With our love to you both.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H.  Huxley.

Abram, Abraham became
By will divine;
Let pickled Brian’s name
Be changed to Brine! 
“Poetae Minores”.