22 6 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xm 



Schoolmaster, naturalist, and coal merchant used to be the three 

 refuges for the incompetent. Schoolmaster is rapidly being 

 eliminated, so I suppose the pressure on Natural History and 

 coals will increase. 



I am glad you have got the Civil Service Commissioners to 

 listen to common sense. I had an awful battle with them 

 (through the Department) over Newton, who is now in your 

 paleontological department. If I recollect rightly, they exam- 

 ined him inter alia on the working of the Poor Laws ! 



The Royal Society has dealt very kindly with me. They 

 patted me on the back when I started thirty-seven years ago, 

 and it was a great encouragement. They give me their best, 

 now that my race is run, and it is a great consolation. At the 

 far end of life all one's work looks so uncommonly small, that 

 the good opinion of one's contemporaries acquires a new value. 



We have a summer's day, and I am writing before an open 

 window ! Yesterday it blew great guns. Ever yours very faith- 

 fully, T. H. HUXLEY. 



The following letter to Lady Welby, the point of which 

 is that to be " moraliy convinced " is not the same thing as 

 to offer scientific proof, refers to an article in the Church 

 Quarterly for October called ' Truthfulness in Science and 

 Religion," evoked by Huxley's Nineteenth Century article on 

 " Science and the Bishops." 



Nov. 27, 1888. 



DEAR LADY WELBY Many thanks for the article in the 

 Church Quarterly, which I return herewith. I am not disposed 

 to bestow any particular attention upon it ; as the writer, though 

 evidently a fair-minded man, appears to me to be entangled in 

 a hopeless intellectual muddle, and one which has no novelty. 

 Christian beliefs profess to be based upon historical facts. If 

 there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth, and if His 

 biography given in the Gospels is a fiction, Christianity vanishes. 



Now the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of 

 history is just as much a question of pure science as the inquiry 

 into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value 

 of evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way. If 

 any one tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in 

 the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I frequently 

 act every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but that 

 it is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of miocene 

 man. 



