I am greatly disgusted that I cannot come to Tyndall’s dinner to-night—­but my brother-in-law’s death would have stopped me (the funeral to-day)—­even if my doctor had not forbidden me to leave my bed.  He says I have some pleuritic effusion on one side and must mind my P’s and Q’s.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[A good deal of correspondence at this time with Sir M. Foster relates to the examinations of the Science and Art Department.  He was still Dean, it will be remembered, of the Royal College of Science, and further kept up his connection with the Department by acting in an honorary capacity as Examiner, setting questions, but less and less looking over papers, acting as the channel for official communications, as when he writes (April 24),] “I send you some Department documents—­nothing alarming, only more worry for the Assistant Examiners, and that we do not mind”; and finally signing the Report.  But to do this after taking so small a share in the actual work of examining, grew more and more repugnant to him, till on October 12 he writes:—­]

I will read the Report and sign it if need be—­though there really must be some fresh arrangement.

Of course I have entire confidence in your judgment about the examination, but I have a mortal horror of putting my name to things I do not know of my own knowledge.

[In addition to these occupations, he wrote a short paper upon a fossil, Ceratochelys, which was read at the Royal Society on March 31; while on April 7 he read at the Linnean ("Botany” volume 24 pages 101-124), his paper, “The Gentians:  Notes and Queries,” which had sprung from his holiday amusement at Arolla.

Philosophy, however, claimed most of his energies.  The campaign begun in answer to the incursion of Mr. Lilly was continued in the article “Science and Pseudo-Scientific Realism” ("Collected Essays” 5 59-89) which appeared in the “Nineteenth Century” for February 1887.  The text for this discourse was the report of a sermon by Canon Liddon, in which that eminent preacher spoke of catastrophes as the antithesis of physical law, yet possible inasmuch as a “lower law” may be “suspended” by the “intervention of a higher,” a mode of reasoning which he applied to the possibility of miracles such as that of Cana.

The man of science was up in arms against this incarnation of abstract terms, and offered a solemn protest against that modern recrudescence of ancient realism which speaks of “laws of nature” as though they were independent entities, agents, and efficient causes of that which happens, instead of simply our name for observed successions of facts.

Carefully as all personalities had been avoided in this article, it called forth a lively reply from the Duke of Argyll, rebuking him for venturing to criticise the preacher, whose name was now brought forward for the first time, and raising a number of other questions, philosophical, geological, and biological, to which Huxley rejoined with some selections from the authentic history of these points in “Science and Pseudo-Science” ("Nineteenth Century” April 1887, “Collected Essays” 5 90-125).