406 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxii 



Devil being "Prince" (note the distinction — not "king") of 

 the Cosmos. 



The a priori road to scientific, political, and all other doc- 

 trine is H.R.H. Satan's invention — it is the intellectual, broad, 

 and easy path which leadeth to Jehannum. 



The King's road is the strait path of painful observation 

 and experiment, and few they be that enter thereon. 



R. G. Latham, queerest of men, had singular flashes of in- 

 sight now and then. Forty years ago he gravely told me that 

 the existence of the Established Church was to his mind one of 

 the best evidences of the recency of the evolution of the human 

 type from the simian. 



How much there is to confirm this view in present public 

 opinion and the intellectual character of those who influence it ! 



It explains all your difficulties at once, and I regret that I 

 do not seem to have mentioned it at any of those mid-day 

 symposia which were so pleasant when you and I were younger. 

 — Ever yours very faithfully, T. H. Huxley. 



P.S. — Apropos of Athelstan Riley and his friends — I feel 

 rather obliged to them. I assented to the compromise (i) be- 

 cause I felt that English opinion would not let us have the edu- 

 cation of the masses at any cheaper price; (2) because, with the 

 Bible in lay hands, I was satisfied that the teaching from it 

 would gradually become modified into harmony with common 

 sense. 



I do not doubt that this is exactly what has happened, and is 

 the ground of the alarm of the orthodox. 



But I do not repent of the compromise in the least. Twenty 

 years of reasonably good primary education is " worth a mass." 



Moreover the Diggleites stand to lose anyhow, and they will 

 lose most completely and finally if they win at the elections this 

 month. So I am rather inclined to hope they may. 



Hodeslea, Staveley Road, Eastbourne, 

 Nov. 3, 1894. 



My dear Mr. Clodd — They say that the first thing an Eng- 

 lishman does when he is hard up for money is to abstain from 

 buying books. The first thing I do when I am liver-y, lumbagy, 

 and generally short of energy, is to abstain from answering 

 letters. And I am only just emerging from a good many weeks 

 of that sort of flabbiness and poverty. 



Many thanks for your notice of Kidd's book. Some vile 

 punsters called it an attempt to put a Kid glove on the iron hand 



