Ever yours affectionately,

T.H.  Huxley.

CHAPTER 3.7.

1890-1891.

[Three letters of the first half of the year may conveniently be placed here.  The first is to Tyndall, who had just been delivering an anti-Gladstonian speech at Belfast.  The opening reference must be to some newspaper paragraph which I have not been able to trace, just as the second is to a paragraph in 1876, not long after Tyndall’s marriage, which described Huxley as starting for America with his titled bride.]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, February 24, 1890.

My dear Tyndall,

Put down the three half-pints and the two dozen to the partnership account.  Ever since the “titled bride” business I have given up the struggle against the popular belief that you and I constitute a firm.

It’s very hard on me in the decline of life to have a lively young partner who thinks nothing of rushing six or seven hundred miles to perform a war-dance on the sainted G.O.M., and takes the scalp of Historicus as an hors d’oeuvre.

All of which doubtless goes down to my account just as my poor innocent articles confer a reputation for long-suffering mildness on you.

Well! well! there is no justice in this world!  With our best love to you both.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[(The confusion in the popular mind continued steadily, so that at last, when Tyndall died, Huxley received the doubtful honour of a funeral sermon.)

Dr. Pelseneer, to whom the next letter is addressed, is a Belgian morphologist, and an authority upon the Mollusca.  He it was who afterwards completed Huxley’s unfinished memoir on Spirula for the “Challenger” report.]

4 Marlborough Place, June 10, 1890.

Dear Dr. Pelseneer,

I gave directions yesterday for the packing up and sending to your address of the specimens of Trigonia, and I trust that they will reach you safely.

I am rejoiced that you are about to take up the subject.  I was but a beginner when I worked at Trigonia, and I had always promised myself that I would try to make good the many deficiencies of my little sketch.  But three or four years ago my health gave way completely, and though I have recovered (no less to my own astonishment than to that of the doctors) I am compelled to live out of London and to abstain from all work which involves much labour.

Thus science has got so far ahead of me that I hesitate to say much about a difficult morphological question—­all the more, as old men like myself should be on their guard against over-much tenderness for their own speculations.  And I am conscious of a great tenderness for those contained in my ancient memoir on the “Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca.”  Certainly I am entirely disposed to agree with you that the Gasteropods and the Lamellibranchs spring from a common root—­nearly represented by the Chiton—­especially by a hypothetical Chiton with one shell plate.