[And again on August 31:—­]

I walked eighteen miles three or four days ago, and I think nothing of one or two thousand feet up!  I hope this state of things will last at the sea-level.

I am always glad to hear of and from you, but I have not been idle long enough to forget what being busy means, so don’t let your conscience worry you about answering my letters.

...X. is, I am afraid, more or less of an ass.  The opposition he and his friends have been making to the Technical Bill is quite unintelligible to me.  Y. may be, and I rather think is, a knave, but he is no fool; and if I mistake not he is minded to kick the ultra-radical stool down now that he has mounted by it.  Make friends of that Mammon of unrighteousness and swamp the sentimentalists.

...I despise your insinuations.  All my friends here have been theological—­Bishop, Chief Rabbi, and Catholic Professor.  None of your Maybrick discussors.

On June 25 he wrote to Professor Ray Lankester, enclosing a letter to be read at a meeting called by the Lord Mayor, on July 1, to hear statements from men of science with regard to the recent increase of rabies in this country, and the efficiency of the treatment discovered by M. Pasteur for the prevention of hydrophobia.

[I quote the latter from the report in “Nature” for July 4:—­]

Monte Generoso, Tessin, Suisse, June 25, 1889.

My dear Lankester,

I enclose herewith a letter for the Lord Mayor and a cheque for 5 pounds as my subscription.  I wish I could make the letter shorter, but it is pretty much “pemmican” already.  However, it does not much matter being read if it only gets into print.

It is uncommonly good of the Lord Mayor to stand up for Science, in the teeth of the row the anti-vivisection pack—­dogs and doggesses—­are making.

May his shadow never be less.

We shall be off to the Maloja at the end of this week, if the weather mends.  Thunderstorms here every day, and sometimes two or three a day for the last ten days.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Monte Generoso, Switzerland, June 25, 1889.

My Lord Mayor,

I greatly regret my inability to be present at the meeting which is to be held, under your Lordship’s auspices, in reference to M. Pasteur and his Institute.  The unremitting labours of that eminent Frenchman during the last half-century have yielded rich harvests of new truths, and are models of exact and refined research.  As such they deserve, and have received, all the honours which those who are the best judges of their purely scientific merits are able to bestow.  But it so happens that these subtle and patient searchings out of the ways of the infinitely little—­of the swarming life where the creature that measures one-thousandth part of an inch is a giant—­have also yielded results of supreme practical importance.