Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

4 Marlborough Place, March 26, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

The only science to which X. has contributed, so far as I know, is the science of self-advertisement; and of that he is a master.

When you and I were youngsters, we thought it the great thing to exorcise the aristocratic flunkeyism which reigned in the Royal Society—­the danger now is that of the entry of seven devils worse than the first, in the shape of rich engineers, chemical traders, and “experts” (who have sold their souls for a good price), and who find it helps them to appear to the public as if they were men of science.

If the Phil Club had kept pure, it might have acted as a check upon the intrusion of the mere trading element.  But there seems to be no reason now against Jack and Tom and Harry getting in, and the thing has become an imposture.

So I go with you for extinction, before we begin to drag in the mud.

I wish I could take some more active part in what is going on.  I am anxious about the Society altogether.  But though I am wonderfully well so long as I live like a hermit, and get out into the air of the Downs, either London, or bother, and still more both combined, intimate respectfully but firmly, that my margin is of the narrowest.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The following is to his daughter in Paris.  Of course it was the Tuileries, not the Louvre, which was destroyed in 1871.]

I think you are quite right about French women.  They are like French dishes, uncommonly well cooked and sent up, but what the dickens they are made of is a mystery.  Not but what all womenkind are mysteries, but there are mysteries of godliness and mysteries of iniquity.

Have you been to see the sculptures in the Louvre?—­dear me, I forgot the Louvre’s fate.  I wonder where the sculpture is?  I used to think it the best thing in the way of art in Paris.  There was a youthful Bacchus who was the main support of my thesis as to the greater beauty of the male figure!

Probably I had better conclude.

To Mr. E.T.  Collings (of Bolton).

4 Marlborough Place, April 9, 1889.

Dear Sir,

I understand that you ask me what I think about “alcohol as a stimulant to the brain in mental work”?

Speaking for myself (and perhaps I may add for persons of my temperament), I can say, without hesitation, that I would just as soon take a dose of arsenic as I would of alcohol, under such circumstances.  Indeed on the whole, I should think the arsenic safer, less likely to lead to physical and moral degradation.  It would be better to die outright than to be alcoholised before death.

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work—­it is an indication on Nature’s part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.