iS6i LETTERS TO HOOKER 24I 



Let me know if you have any fault to find with the new 

 Reviezv. I think you will see it would have been a dreadful busi- 

 ness to translate all the German titles in the bibliography. I 

 returned from a ramble about Snowdon with Busk and Tyndall 

 on the 31st, all the better. My wife is decidedly improved, 

 though she mends but slowly. 



Our best wishes to you and all yours. — Ever yours faithfully, 



T. H. Huxley. 



Any fragments from the rich man's table for the next No. 

 of N.H.R.? 



14 Waverley Place, Jan. 6, 1861. 



My dear Hooker — My wife and I were very pleased to get 

 your hearty and kind acceptance of Godfathership. We shall 

 not call upon you for some time, I fancy, as the mistress doesn't 

 get strong very fast. However, I am only glad she is well as she 

 is. She came down yesterday for the first time. 



It is very pleasant to get such expressions of opinion as I 

 have had from you, Lyell, and Darwin about the Review. They 

 make me quite hopeful about its prosperity, as I am sure we 

 shall be able to do better than our first number. 



I am glad you liked what I said in the opening of my article.* 

 I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who 

 delight in degrading man, or with the common run of material- 

 ists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of 

 matter. I dislike them even more than I do the pietists. 



Some of these days I shall look up the ape question again, 

 and go over the rest of the organisation in the same way. But 

 in order to get a thorough grip of the question, I must examine 



bilities of individual development, making it only fair to a child to 

 give it a connection with the official spiritual organisation of its coun- 

 try, which it could either ignore or continue on reaching intellectual 

 maturity. 



* In l\ie Natural History Review {\%b\, p. 67). — "The proof of his 

 claim to independent parentage will not change the brutishness of 

 man's lower nature ; nor, except in those valet souls who cannot see 

 greatness in their fellow because his father was a cobbler, will the 

 demonstration of a pithecoid pedigree one whit diminish man's divine 

 right of kingship over nature ; nor lower the great and princely dig- 

 nity of perfect manhood, which is an order of nobility not inherited, 

 but to be won by each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and 

 avoids evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their 

 fittest use." 



