14 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. I 



The situation is further developed in a letter to 

 Darwin : 



JERMYN STREET, June 22, 1870. 



MY DEAR DARWIN I sent the books to Queen Anne 

 St. this morning. Pray keep them as long as you like, 

 as I am not using them. 



I am greatly disgusted that you are coming up to 

 London this week, as we shall be out of town next Sunday. 

 It is the rarest thing in the world for us to be away, and 

 you have pitched upon the one day. Cannot we arrange 

 some other day ? 



I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your 

 sake, but for theirs. There seems to have been a tre- 

 mendous shindy in the Hebdomadal board about certain 

 persons who were proposed ; and I am told that Pusey 

 came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend 

 who were the blackest heretics out of the list proposed, and 

 that he was glad to assent to your being doctored, when 

 he got back, in order to keep out seven devils worse than 

 that first ! 



Ever, oh Coryphaeus diabolicus, your faithful follower, 



T. H. HUXLEY. 



The choice of a subject for his Presidential Address 

 at the British Association for 1870, a subject which, 

 as he put it, " has lain chiefly in a land flowing with 

 the abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and 

 mouldiness," was suggested by a recent controversy 

 upon the origin of life, in which the experiments of 

 Dr. Bastian, then Professor of Pathological Anatomy 

 at University College, London, which seemed to 

 prove spontaneous generation, were shown by 

 Professor Tyndall to contain a flaw. Huxley had 



