36 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap. II 



I have been toiling at my address this morning. It is all 

 printed, but I must turn it inside out, and make a speech of it if 

 I am to make any impression on the audience in St. James' Hall. 

 Confound all such bobberies. 



August 9. — I got through my address to-day as well as I 

 ever did anything. There was a large audience, as it was the 

 final meeting of the Congress, and to my surprise I found myself 

 in excellent voice and vigour. So there is life in the old dog 

 yet. But I am greatly relieved it is over, as I have been getting 

 rather shaky. 



When the Medical Congress was over, he joined his 

 family at Grasmere for the rest of August. In September 

 he attended the British Association at York, where he read 

 a paper on the " Rise and Progress of Paleontology," and 

 ended the month with fishery business at Aberystwith and 

 Carmarthen. 



The above paper is to be found in Collected Essays, iv. 

 p. 24. In it he concludes an historical survey of the views 

 held about fossils by a comparison of the opposite hy- 

 potheses upon which the vast store of recently accumulated 

 facts may be interpreted ; and declaring for the hypothesis 

 of evolution, repeats the remarkable words of the " Coming 

 of Age of the Origin of Species," that " the paleontological 

 discoveries of the last decade are so completely in accord- 

 ance with the requirements of this hypothesis that, if it 

 had not existed, the paleontologist would have had to in- 

 vent it." 



In February died Thomas Carlyle. Mention has al- 

 ready been made of the influence of his writings upon 

 Huxley in strengthening and fixing once for all, at the 

 very outset of his career, that hatred of shams and love 

 of veracity, which were to. be the chief principle of his 

 whole life. It was an obligation he never forgot, and 

 for this, if for nothing else, he was ready to join in a 

 memorial to the man. In reply to a request for his sup- 

 port in so doing, he wrote to Lord Stanley of Alderley 

 on March 9 : — 



Anything I can do to help in raising a memorial to Carlyle 

 shall be most willingly done. Few men can have dissented more 



