346 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAl'. XIII 



dinner, but was glad you were not. Especially as next 

 morning tliere was a beastly fog, out of which I bolted 

 home as fast as possible. 



I shall have to give up these escapades. They knock 

 me up for a week afterwards. And really it is a pity, 

 just as I have got over my horror of public speaking, 

 and find it very amusing. But I suppose I should 

 gravitate into a bore as old fellows do, and so it is as 

 well I am kept out of temptation. 



I will try to remember what I said at the Nature 

 dinner.^ I scolded the young fellows pretty sharply for 

 their slovenly writing. 



There will be a tenth vol. of Essays some day, and 

 an Index renun. Do you remember how you scolded 

 me for being too speculative in my maiden lecture on 

 Animal Individuality forty odd years ago ? " On revient 

 toujours," or, to put it another way, " The dog returns 

 to his etc. etc." 



So I am deep in philosophy, grovelling tlirough 

 Diogenes Laertius — Plutarch's Placita and sich — and 

 often wondering whether the schoolmasters have any 

 better ground for maintaining that Greek is a finer 

 language than English than the fact that they can't 

 write the latter dialect. 



So far as I can see, my faculties are as good (including 

 memory for anything that is not useful) as they were 

 fifty years ago, but I can't work long hours, or live out 

 of fresh air. Three days of London bowLs me over. 



I expect you are in much the same case. But you 

 seem to be able to stoop over specimens in a way im- 

 possible to me. It is that incapacity has made me give 

 up dissection and microscopic work. I do a lot on my 

 back, and I can tell you that the latter postiu'e is an 

 immense economy of strength. Indeed, when my heart 



1 A brief report of this speech is to be found in the British 

 Medical Journal for December 8, 1894, p. 1262. 



