[He was now preparing to complete his campaign of the spring on technical education by delivering an address to the Technical Education Association at Manchester on November 29, and looked forward to attending the anniversary meeting of the Royal Society on his way home next day, and seeing the Copley medal conferred upon his old friend, Sir J. Hooker.  However, unexpected trouble befell him.  First he was much alarmed about his wife, who had been ill more or less ever since leaving Arolla.  Happily it turned out that there was nothing worse than could be set right by a slight operation.  But nothing had been done when news came of the sudden death of his second daughter on November 19.] “I have no heart for anything just now,” [he writes; nevertheless, he forced himself to fulfil this important engagement at Manchester, and in the end the necessity of bracing himself for the undertaking acted on him as a tonic.

It is a trifle, perhaps, but a trifle significant of the disturbance of mind that could override so firmly fixed a habit, that the two first letters he wrote after receiving the news are undated; almost the only omission of the sort I have found in all his letters of the last twenty-five years of his life.

His daughter’s long illness had left him without hope for months past, but this, as he confessed, did not mend matters much.  In his letters to his two most intimate friends, he recalls her brilliant promise, her happy marriage, her] “faculty for art, which some of the best artists have told me amounted to genius.” [But he was naturally reticent in these matters, and would hardly write of his own griefs unbidden even to old friends.]

85 Marina, St. Leonards, November 21, 1887.

My dear Spencer,

You will not have forgotten my bright girl Marian, who married so happily and with such bright prospects half a dozen years ago?

Well, she died three days ago of a sudden attack of pneumonia, which carried her off almost without warning.  And I cannot convey to you a sense of the terrible sufferings of the last three years better than by saying that I, her father, who loved her well, am glad that the end has come thus...

My poor wife is well nigh crushed by the blow.  For though I had lost hope, it was not in the nature of things that she should.

Don’t answer this—­I have half a mind to tear it up—­for when one is in a pool of trouble there is no sort of good in splashing other people.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[As for his plans, he writes to Sir J. Hooker on November 21:—­]

I had set my heart on seeing you get the Copley on the 30th.  In fact, I made the Manchester people, to whom I had made a promise to go down and address the Technical Education Association, change their day to the 29th for that reason.

I cannot leave them in the lurch after stirring up the business in the way I have done, and I must go and give my address.  But I must get back to my poor wife as fast as I can, and I cannot face any more publicity than that which it would be cowardly to shirk just now.  So I shall not be at the Society except in the spirit.