I am glad that the audience (I judge from the “Times” report) seemed to take the points of my letter, and live in hope that when I see last week’s “Spectator” I shall find Hutton frantic.

This morning a letter marked “Immediate” reached me from Bourne, date July 3.  I am afraid he does not read the papers or he would have known it was of no use to appeal to me in an emergency.  I am writing to him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[On his return to England, however, a fortnight of London, interrupted though it was by a brief visit to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the delightful old house of Great Hampden, was as much as he could stand.  “I begin to discover,” he writes to Sir M. Foster, “I have a heart again, a circumstance of which I had no reminder at the Maloja.”  So he retreated at once to Eastbourne, which had done him so much good before.]

4 Marlborough Place, September 24, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

How’s a’ wi’ ye’?  We came back from the Engadine early in the month, and are off to Eastbourne to-morrow.  I rejuvenate in Switzerland and senescate (if there is no such verb, there ought to be) in London, and the sooner I am out of it the better.

When are you going to have an x?  I cannot make out what has become of
Spencer, except that he is somewhere in Scotland.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

We shall be at our old quarters—­3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne—­from to-morrow onwards.

[The next letter shows once more the value he set upon botanical evidence in the question of the influence of conditions in the process of evolution.]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, September 29, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

I hope to be with you at the Athenaeum on Thursday.  It does one good to hear of your being in such good working order.  My knowledge of orchids is infinitesimally small, but there were some eight or nine species plentiful in the Engadine, and I learned enough to appreciate the difficulties.  Why do not some of these people who talk about the direct influence of conditions try to explain the structure of orchids on that tack?  Orchids at any rate can’t try to improve themselves in taking shots at insects’ heads with pollen bags—­as Lamarck’s Giraffes tried to stretch their necks!

Balfour’s ballon d’essai [I.e. touching a proposed Roman Catholic University for Ireland.] (I do not believe it could have been anything more) is the only big blunder he has made, and it passes my comprehension why he should have made it.  But he seems to have dropped it again like the proverbial hot potato.  If he had not, he would have hopelessly destroyed the Unionist party.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[At the end of the year he thanks Lord Tennyson for his gift of “Demeter":—­]

December 26, 1889.

My dear Tennyson,