450 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CUAP. XXIII 



Professorship at the Royal Institution. So he writes 

 to Professor (afterwards Sir William) Flower : 



JERMYN STREET, June 7, 1869. 

 Private, Confidential, Particular. 



MY DEAR FLOWER I have written to Quain l to tell 

 him that I do not propose to be put in nomination for 

 the Hunterian Chair this year. I really cannot stand it 

 with the British Association hanging over my head. So 

 make thy shoulders ready for the gown, and practise the 

 goose-step in order to march properly behind the mace, 

 and I will come and hear your inaugural. Ever yours, 



T. H. HUXLEY. 



The meeting of the Association to which he refers 

 took place at Exeter, and he writes of it to Darwin 

 (September 28) : 



As usual, your abominable heresies were the means of 

 getting me into all sorts of hot water at the Association. 

 Three parsons set upon you, and if you were the most 

 malicious of men you could not have wished them to 

 have made greater fools of themselves than they did. 

 They got considerably chaffed, and that was all they were 

 worth. 2 



And to Tyndall, whom an accident had kept in 

 Switzerland : 



After a sharp fight for Edinburgh, Liverpool was 

 adopted as the place of meeting for the Association of 



1 President of the Royal College of Surgeons. 



2 It is perhaps scarcely worth while exhuming these long- 

 forgotten arguments in their entirety ; but any one curious enough 

 to consult the report of the meeting preserved in the files of the 

 Academy, will find, among other things, an entirely novel theory 

 as to the relation of the Cherubim to terrestrial creation. 



