My dear Spencer,

I have nothing to criticise in the enclosed except that the itineraries seem to me rather superfluous.

I am glad to find that you forget things that have happened to you as completely as I do.  I should cut almost as bad a figure as “Sir Roger” if I were cross-examined about my past life.

Your allusion to sending me the proofs made me laugh by reminding me of a particularly insolent criticism with which I once favoured you:  “No objection except to the whole.”

It was some piece of diabolical dialectics, in which I could pick no hole, if the premises were granted—­and even then could be questioned only by an ultra-sceptic!

Do you see that the American Association of Authors has adopted a Resolution, which is a complete endorsement of my view of the stamp-swindle?

We have got our operation over, and my wife is going on very well.  Overmuch anxiety has been telling on me, but I shall throw it off.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

CHAPTER 3.3.

1888.

[Huxley had returned to town before Christmas, for the house in St. John’s Wood was still the rallying-point for the family, although his elder children were now married and dispersed.  But he did not stay long.] “Wife wonderfully better,” [he writes to Sir M. Foster on January 8,] “self as melancholy as a pelican in the wilderness.” [He meant to have left London on the 16th, but his depressed condition proved to be the beginning of a second attack of pleurisy, and he was unable to start for Bournemouth till the 24th.

Here, however, his recovery was very slow.  He was unable to come up to the first meeting of the x Club.] “I trust,” [he writes,] “I shall be able to be at the next x—­but I am getting on very slowly.  I can’t walk above a couple of miles without being exhausted, and talking for twenty minutes has the same effect.  I suppose it is all Anno Domini.”

[But he had a pleasant visit from one of the x, and writes:—­]

Casalini, West Cliff, Bournemouth, January 29, 1888.

My dear Hooker,

Spencer was here an hour ago as lively as a cricket.  He is going back to town on Tuesday to plunge into the dissipations of the Metropolis.  I expect he will insist on you all going to Evans’ (or whatever represents that place to our descendants) after the x.

Bellows very creaky—­took me six weeks to get them mended last time, so
I suppose I may expect as long now.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[As appears from the letters which follow, he had been busied with writing an article for the “Nineteenth Century,” for February, on the “Struggle for Existence” ("Collected Essays” 9 195.), which on the one hand ran counter to some of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theories of society; and on the other, is noticeable as briefly enunciating the main thesis of his “Romanes Lecture” of 1893.]