418 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xvii 



of Mr. Eckersley (whose son had married Huxley's 

 third daughter ) : 



. . . Lord Iddesleigh's letter offering to sxibmit my 

 name for an honorary pension was a complete surprise. 



My chiefs in the late Government wished to retire me 

 on full pay, but the Treasury did not see their way to it, 

 and cut off 300 a year. Naturally I am not sorry to 

 have the loss made good, but the way the thing was 

 done is perhaps the pleasantest part of it. 



There was a certain grim appropriateness in his 

 "official death" following hard upon his sixtieth 

 birthday, for sixty was the age at which he had long 

 declared that men of science ought to be strangled, 

 lest age should harden them against the reception of 

 new truths, and make them into clogs upon progress, 

 the worse, in proportion to the influence they had 

 deservedly won. This is the allusion in a birthday 

 letter from Sir M. Foster : 



REVEREND SIR So the "day of strangulation" has 

 arrived at last, and with it the humble petition of your 

 friends that you may be induced to defer the "happy 

 dispatch" for, say at least ten years, when the subject 

 may again come up for consideration. For your 

 petitioners are respectfully inclined to think that if your 

 sixtyship may be induced so far to become an apostle as 

 to give up the fishery business, and be led to leave the 

 Black Board at S.K. to others, the t'other side sixty 

 years, may after all be the best years of your life. In 

 any case they would desire to bring under your notice 

 the fact that they feel they want you as much as ever they 

 did. Ever thine, M. F. 





