iS6i DEATH OF HENSLOW 243 



compelled to go out again to Australia to look after a busi- 

 ness venture of his which had come to grief. 



Meantime the old house was still on his hands for an- 

 other year. Trying to find a tenant, he writes on May 21 

 1861 :— 



I met J. Tyndall at Ramsay's last night, and I think he is 

 greatly inclined to have the house. I gave him your message 

 and found that a sneaking kindness for the old house actuated 

 him a good deal in wishing to take it. It is not a bad fellow, 

 and we won't do him much on the fixtures. 



Eventually Tyndall and his friend Hirst established 

 themselves there. 



This spring Professor Henslow, Mrs. Hooker's father, a 

 botanist of the first rank, and a man extraordinarily beloved 

 by all who came in contact with him, was seized with a 

 mortal illness, and lingered on without hope of recovery 

 through almost the whole of April. Huxley writes ; — 



Jermyn Street, April \, 1861. 



My dear Hooker — I am very much grieved and shocked by 

 your letter. The evening before last I heard from Busk that 

 your father-in-law had been ill, and that you had been to see 

 him, and I meant to have written to you yesterday to inquire, 

 but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And 

 then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you 

 at the Linnaean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. 

 God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what 

 a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in 

 one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irrep- 

 arable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out 

 of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and 

 that great calm catholic judgment and sense which always 

 seemed to me more prominent in him than in any man I ever 

 knew. 



He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, 

 and force of character to do it ; which of us dare ask for a 

 higher summary of his life than that? For such a man there 

 can be no fear in facing the great unknown, his life has been 

 one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by 

 which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them 

 still as he lays his head down for his long sleep. 



