Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2

Chapter 2.1. 1870.

It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies. His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held "without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism, materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."

But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform, seeking not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show, in theory and practice, how scientific training might be introduced into the general system of education. He was more than once asked to stand for Parliament, but refused, thinking he could do more useful work for his country outside.

The publication in 1870 of "Lay Sermons," the first of a series of similar volumes, served, by concentrating his moral and intellectual philosophy, to make his influence as a teacher of men more widely felt. The "active scepticism," whose conclusions many feared, was yet acknowledged as the quality of mind which had made him one of the clearest thinkers and safest scientific guides of his time, while his keen sense of right and wrong made the more reflective of those who opposed his conclusions hesitate long before expressing a doubt as to the good influence of his writings. This view is very clearly expressed in a review of the book in the "Nation" (New York 1870 11 407).

And as another review of the "Lay Sermons" puts it ("Nature" 3 22), he began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy smooth things.

During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work, and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870 onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less. For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society' which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to 1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)

The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.

The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was President, on "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind," March 9--and on "The Ethnology of Britain," May 10--the substance of which appeared in the "Contemporary Review" for July under the title of "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology" ("Collected Essays" 7 253). As President also of the Geological Society and of the British Association, he had two important addresses to deliver. In addition to this, he delivered an address before the Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on "Descartes' Discourse."

How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to Down:--]

26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

It is hard to resist an invitation of yours--but I dine out on Saturday; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of one kind or another. And there is that horrid Geological address looming in the future!

I am afraid I must deny myself at present.

I am glad you liked the sermon. Did you see the "Devonshire man's" attack in the "Pall Mall?"

I have been wasting my time in polishing that worthy off. I would not have troubled myself about him, if it were not for the political bearing of the Celt question just now.

My wife sends her love to all you.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

The "Devonshire Man" wrote on January 18 to the "Pall Mall Gazette," objecting to the statement that "Devonshire men are as little Anglo-Saxons as Northumbrians are Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st, meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or the pure Irish? Milesian, Firbolg, or Cruithneach?

But the "Devonshire Man" did not confine himself to science. He indulged in various personalities, to the smartest of which, a parody of Sydney Smith's dictum on Dr. Whewell, Huxley replied:--]

"A Devonshire Man" is good enough to say of me that "cutting up monkeys is his forte, and cutting up men is his foible." With your permission, I propose to cut up "A Devonshire Man"; but I leave it to the public to judge whether, when so employed, my occupation is to be referred to the former or to the latter category.

The same question is developed in the address to the Ethnological Society later in the year and in "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology" (see above), and reiterated in an address from the chair in

Section D At the British Association in 1878 At Dublin, and in a

letter to the "Times" for October 12, 1887, apropos of a leading article upon "British Race-types of To-day."

Letter-writing was difficult under such pressure of work, but the claims of absent friends were not wholly forgotten, though left on one side for a time, and the warm-hearted Dohrn, could not bear to think himself forgotten, managed to get a letter out of him--not on scientific business.]

26 Abbey Place, January 30, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I have not written to you. But in another sense, I do not, for I have very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you once before, your memory always remains green in the "happy family."

But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will content to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off, I shall be a friendless old man.

As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture says that "a living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a living dog. By the way, I bought Cotta's edition of him the other day, and there he stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble edges. Do you know I did a version of his "Aphorisms on Nature" into English the other day. [For the first number of "Nature," November 1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little. When they began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly gone mad!

But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received your volume on the "Arthropods" the other day, but I shall not be able to look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of office as President expires.

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