xxvi] HUXLEY 37 



consequently very irritable, when I met you yesterday. Pray 

 forgive me if I was too plain spoken, 



" And believe me, as always, 



■ Yours very faithfully, 



"T. H. Huxley. 



"Jermyn Street, February 14, 1870." 



In a letter he wrote me, in 1881, on another matter he 

 refers to my former intimacy with his children. " Your little 

 friends are grown to be big friends. Two are married, and 

 one has made me a grandfather. Leonard, my eldest boy, 

 is six feet high, and at Balliol ; even the smallest of the 

 mites you knew is taller than her mother. All within reach 

 unite with me in kindest regards and remembrances." 



In 1 89 1 I had read two books by Mr. Arthur J. Bell, a 

 Devonshire gentleman who had devoted himself to the study 

 of the modern physical sciences in their relation to the 

 deepest problems of our nature and destiny. The first was 

 entitled, " Whence comes Man, from ' Nature ' or from ■ God ' ? " 

 The second, published two years after the first, as a sequel 

 to it, was called, " Why does Man Exist ? " I was greatly 

 struck with the power of reasoning, the clearness of style, 

 and the broad grasp of the whole subject displayed by the 

 author, and having written to him to say how much I had 

 enjoyed his books, he called upon me at Parkstone, and in 

 the course of conversation he expressed a great desire that 

 Huxley should be induced to read them — at all events the 

 second, which, though a sequel to the first, is quite independent 

 of it. 1 I therefore wrote to Huxley, telling him the author 



1 As I. am sure that there are many persons who have never heard of these 

 books who would greatly enjoy them, I will here quote the subject-matter of the 

 second as stated in the last page of the first work, as follows : — 



" Before replying to the question with which we started— the question, 

 ' Whence comes Man,/rom " Nature " or from "God " ? ' — we must, I think, state 

 what man is. 



M As it seems to me, man is the highest development of the ' Power ' called 

 1 Life ' — a Power added, at a comparatively late period of geological time, to 

 Powers already existing. 



M To the question, then, 'Whence comes man ; does he come from Nature or 

 from God ? ' we must, I think, reply that not only man, but Nature also, owe 



