, 



OWEN'S SCIENTIFIC WORK 349 



Huxley had been asked by Sir Richard Owen's grandson 

 and biographer to contribute an appreciation of his character 

 and scientific work. He restricted himself to the latter. 



To T. H. Huxley 



October 8, 1893. 



Though certainly I should never have expected it, I am 

 not surprised at your undertaking the estimate of R. O.'s 

 scientific work. No one is so well qualified, and I am sure 

 that it will be done in a spirit of perfect good taste, and with 

 judicial fairness — tending to the merciful. . . . Under any 

 circumstances I will gladly look over it, and give you my 

 opinion. 



Yes, Jowett is gone — a phoenix. Dissolution is ever 

 jogging our elbows ; on Friday I was at my cousin Eliza- 

 beth's * funeral. I first saw her in 1820, and we have been 

 fast friends for many a long year. On the following day I 

 had another funeral to attend, one here, of the Mother-in- 

 law of Flower's son, Mrs. King Chambers. I am kept well 

 alive to the fact that people come here to die. 



I have finished Vol. I. [of Huxley's Collected Essays] 

 with keen interest. I like Descartes best, he seems to me 

 the most subtle in analysis, and wonderfully lucid. I well 

 remember looking at his statue in Touraine, reading the 

 inscription, and turning away saying to myself that the 

 converse, ' I am, therefore I think,' is quite as logical. I 

 told you ages ago that I hated Metaphysics — but did not 

 add, that my Metaphysics was six months of the ' Moral 

 Philosophy ' class of a Scotch divine ! 



In December 1893 the death of his old friend John Tyndall 

 by a tragic misadventure came as a great shock. * Another 

 of us has gone,' he exclaimed to Huxley. * What a tragedy 

 it all is — it seems to take a bite out of one's life. He, you 

 and I took to one another in 1857.' And to another friend : 

 * He was quite the purest,' brightest creature I ever knew to 

 be a philosopher,' a man of whom he wrote to his cousin Francis 

 Palgrave, five-and-twenty years before, when Tyndall had 



1 Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake, nee Rigby ; widow of Sir Charles Lock East- 

 lake, President of the Royal Academy. 



