1890 DR. ABBOTT ON ILLUSIONS 167 



The end of the correspondence was quite amicable. 

 Dr. Abbott explained that he had taken his facts 

 from the recently published "Autobiography," and 

 that the reporters had wonderfully altered what he 

 really said by large omissions. In a second letter 

 {Times, October 11) Huxley says : — 



I am miicli obliged to Dr. Abbott for his courteous 

 explanatiou. I myself have suffered so many things at 

 the hands of so many reporters — of whom it may too 

 often be said that their " faith, xmfaithful, makes them 

 falsely true " — that I can fully enter into what his feelings 

 must have been when he contemplated the picture of his 

 discourse, in which the lights on " raw midshipmen," 

 "pessimist out and out," "devil take the hindmost," and 

 " Heine's dragoon," were so high, while the " good things " 

 he was kind enough to say about me lay in the deep 

 shadow of the invisible. And I can assure Dr. Abbott 

 that I should not have dreamed of noticing the report of 

 his interesting lecture, which I read when it appeared, 

 had it not been made the subject of the leading article 

 which drew the attention of all the world to it on the 

 following day. 



I was well aware that Dr. Abbott must have founded 

 his remarks on the brief notice of my life which (without 

 my knowledge) has been thrust into its present ridiculous 

 position among biographies of eminent musicians ; and most 

 undoubtedly anything I have said there is public property 

 But erroneous suppositions imaginatively connected with 

 what I have said appear to me to stand upon a different 

 footing, especially when they are interspersed with 

 remarks injurious to my early friends. Some of the 

 " raw midshipmen and unlearned naval officers " of whom 

 Dr. Abbott speaks, in terms which he certainly did not 

 find in my " autobiography," are, I am glad to say, still 

 alive, and are performing, or have performed, valuable 



