336 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxiii 



Jermyn Street, June 7, 1869. 



Private, Confidential, Particular. 



My DEAR Flower — I have written to Quain * 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 get- 

 ting 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.f 



And to Tyndall, whom an accident had kept in Switzer- 

 land : — 



After a sharp fight for Edinburgh, Liverpool was adopted 

 as the place of meeting for the Association of 1870, and I am 

 to be President; although the Times says that my best friends 

 tremble for me. (I hope you are not among that particular lot 

 of my best friends.) 



I think we shall have a good meeting, and you know you are 

 pledged to give a lecture even if you come with your leg in 

 a sling. 



The foundation of the Metaphysical Society in 1869 was 

 not without interest as a sign of the times. As in the new 

 birth of thought which put a period to the Middle Ages, 

 so in the Victorian Renaissance, a vast intellectual ferment 

 had taken immediate shape in a fierce struggle with long 



* President of the Royal College of Surgeons. 



•|- It is perhaps scarcely worth while exhuming these long-forgotten 

 arguments in their entirety ; but anyone 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. 



