xxvi] HUXLEY 39 



" I get along very well under condition of keeping quiet 

 here, and I am happy to say that my wife, who joins with 

 me in kind remembrances, has greatly improved in health 

 since we settled here. 



" Ever yours very faithfully, 



"T. H. Huxley." 



Although Huxley was as kind and genial a friend and 

 companion as Darwin himself, and that I was quite at ease 

 with him in his family circle, or in after-dinner talk with a 

 few of his intimates (and although he was two years younger 

 than myself), yet I never got over a feeling of awe and 

 inferiority when discussing any problem in evolution or allied 

 subjects — an inferiority which I did not feel either with 

 Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell. This was due, I think, to the 

 fact that the enormous amount of Huxley's knowledge was 

 of a kind of which I possessed only an irreducible minimum, 

 and of which I often felt the want. In the general anatomy 

 and physiology of the whole animal kingdom, living and 

 extinct, Huxley was a master, the equal — perhaps the 

 superior — of the greatest authorities on these subjects in 

 the scientific world ; whereas I had never had an hour's 

 instruction in either of them, had never seen a dissection of 

 any kind, and never had any inclination to practise the art 

 myself. Whenever I had to touch upon these subjects, or 

 to use them to enforce my arguments, I had to get both 

 my facts and my arguments at second hand, and appeal to 

 authority both for facts and conclusions from them. And 

 because I was thus ignorant, and because I had a positive 

 distaste for all forms of anatomical and physiological experi- 

 ment, I perhaps over-estimated this branch of knowledge 

 and looked up to those who possessed it in a pre-eminent 

 degree as altogether above myself. 



With Darwin and Lyell, on the other hand, although both 

 possessed stores of knowledge far beyond my own, yet I did 

 possess some knowledge of the same kind, and felt myself in 

 a position to make use of their facts and those of all other 

 students in the same fields of research quite as well as the 



