I am quite agreed with the proposed arrangements for the x, and hope I shall show better in the register of attendance next session.

When I am striding about the hills here I really feel as if my invalidism were a mere piece of malingering.  When I am well I can walk up hill and down dale as well as I did twenty years ago.  But my margin is abominably narrow, and I am at the mercy of “liver and lights.”  Sitting up for long and dining are questions of margin.

I do not know if you have been here.  We are close on 4000 feet up and look straight over the great plain of North Italy on the one side and to a great hemicycle of mountains, Monte Rosa among them, on the other.  I do not know anything more beautiful in its way.  But the whole time we have been here the weather has been extraordinary.  On the average, about two thunderstorms per diem.  I am sure that a good meteorologist might study the place with advantage.  The barometer has not varied three-twentieths of an inch the whole time, notwithstanding the storms.

I hear the weather has been bad all over Switzerland, but it is not high and dry enough for me here, and we shall be off to the Maloja on Saturday next, and shall stay there till we return somewhere in September.  Collier and Ethel will join us there in August.  He is none the worse for his scarlatina.

“Aged Botanist?” marry come up! [Sir J. Hooker jestingly congratulated him on taking up botany in his old age.] I should like to know of a younger spark.  The first time I heard myself called “the old gentleman” was years ago when we were in South Devon.  A half-drunken Devonian had made himself very offensive, in the compartment in which my wife and I were travelling, and got some “simple Saxon” from me, accompanied, I doubt not, by an awful scowl “Ain’t the old gentleman in a rage,” says he.

I am very glad to hear of Reggie’s success, and my wife joins with me in congratulations.  It is a comfort to see one’s shoots planted out and taking root, though the idea that one’s cares and anxieties about them are diminished, we find to be an illusion.

I inclose cheque for my contributions due and to come. [For the x Club.] If I go to Davy’s Locker before October, the latter may go for consolation champagne!

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H.  Huxley.

[He writes from the Maloja on August 16 to Sir M. Foster, who had been sitting on the Vaccination Commission:—­]

I wonder how you are prospering, whether you have vaccination or anti-vaccination on the brain; or whether the gods have prospered you so far as to send you on a holiday.  We have been here since the beginning of July.  Monte Generoso proved lovely—­but electrical.  We had on the average three thunderstorms every two days.  Bellagio was as hot as the tropics, and we stayed only a day, and came on here—­where, whatever else may happen, it is never too hot.  The weather has been good and I have profited immensely, and at present I do not know whether I have a heart or not.  But I have to look very sharp after my liver.  H. Thompson, who has been here with his son Herbert (clever fellow, by the way), treats the notion that I ever had a dilated heart with scorn!  Oh these doctors! they are worse than theologians.