OBJECT OF THE CLUB 545 



The club met 240 times, the average attendance being seven 

 up to 1883, and the whole nine assembling on twenty-seven 

 occasions. Hooker himself attended 169 times. The original 

 circle remained unbroken for nearly nineteen years. Spottis- 

 woode died in 1883; Buskin 1886. The meetings, wrote Huxley, 

 ' were steadily continued for some twenty years, before our ranks 

 began to thin ; and one by one, geistige Naturen such as those 

 for which the poet so willingly paid the ferryman, 1 silent but 

 not unregarded, took the vacated places.' Proposals were 

 often made to fill up the gaps, especially when ill-health drove 

 other members to live out of town ; but as the x really had ' no 

 raison d'etre beyond the personal attachment of its original 

 members/ it seemed to some that new members, however 

 personally welcome, could not be admitted without destroying 

 the unique relationship of friendship joined to a common 

 experience of struggle and success. This feeling was expressed 

 by Huxley in a letter to Frankland of 1886 : 



Nobody could have foreseen or expected twenty years 

 ago when we first met, that we were destined to play the 

 parts we have since played, and it is in the nature of things 

 impossible that any of the new members proposed (much 

 as we may like and respect them all), can carry on the work 

 which has so strangely fallen to us. 



An axe with a new head and a new handle may be the 

 same axe in one sense, but it is not the familiar friend with 

 which one has cut one's way through wood and brier. 



And to Hooker two years later : 



The club has never had any purpose except the purely 

 personal object of bringing together a few friends who did 

 not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies 

 had developed into bigwigs of various kinds, and therefore 

 the club has incidentally I might say accidentally* had 

 a good deal of influence in the scientific world. But if I had 



1 Nimm dann Fiihrmann, 

 Nimm die Miethe 

 Die ich gerne dreifach biete ; 

 Zwei, die eben iiberfuhren 

 Waren geistige Naturen. 



