I am glad you have got the Civil Service Commissioners to listen to common sense.  I had an awful battle with them (through the Department) over Newton, who is now in your paleontological department.  If I recollect rightly, they examined him inter alia on the working of the Poor Laws!

The Royal Society has dealt very kindly with me.  They patted me on the back when I started thirty-seven years ago, and it was a great encouragement.  They give me their best, now that my race is run, and it is a great consolation.  At the far end of life all one’s work looks so uncommonly small, that the good opinion of one’s contemporaries acquires a new value.

We have a summer’s day, and I am writing before an open window!  Yesterday it blew great guns.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The following letter to Lady Welby, the point of which is that to be “morally convinced” is not the same thing as to offer scientific proof, refers to an article in the “Church Quarterly” for October called “Truthfulness in Science and Religion,” evoked by Huxley’s “Nineteenth Century” article on “Science and the Bishops.”]

November 27, 1888.

Dear Lady Welby,

Many thanks for the article in the “Church Quarterly”, which I return herewith.  I am not disposed to bestow any particular attention upon it; as the writer, though evidently a fair-minded man, appears to me to be entangled in a hopeless intellectual muddle, and one which has no novelty.  Christian beliefs profess to be based upon historical facts.  If there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth, and if His biography given in the Gospels is a fiction, Christianity vanishes.

Now the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history is just as much a question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value of evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way.  If any one tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but that it is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of miocene man.

Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we constantly, and in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon extremely bad evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in consequence.  And surely one must be something worse than a born fool to pretend that such decision under the pressure of the enigmas of life ought to have the smallest influence in those judgments which are made with due and sufficient deliberation.  You will see that these considerations go to the root of the whole matter.  I regret that I cannot discuss the question more at length and deal with sundry topics put forward in your letter.  At present writing is a burden to me.

[A letter to Professor Ray Lankester mixes grave and gay in a little homily, edged by personal experience, on the virtues and vices of combativeness.]