358 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxiv 



Now I think that the best service I can render to all you 

 enterprising young men is to turn devil's advocate, and do my 

 best to pick holes in your work. 



By the way Mikluko-Maclay * has been here ; I have seen a 

 good deal of him, and he strikes me as a man of very consider- 

 able capacity and energy. He was to return to Jena to-day. 



My friend Herbert Spencer will be glad to learn that you 

 appreciate his book. I have been his devil's advocate for a 

 number of years, and there is no telling how many brilliant 

 speculations I have been the means of choking in an embryonic 

 state. 



My wife does not know that I am writing to you, or she 

 would say apropos of your last paragraph that you are an en- 

 tirely unreasonable creature in your notions of how friendship 

 should be manifested, and that you make no allowances for the 

 oppression and exhaustion of the work entailed by what Jean 

 Paul calls a " Tochtervolles Haus." I hope I may live to see 

 you with at least ten children, and then my wife and I will be 

 avenged. Our children will be married and settled by that time, 

 and we shall have time to write every day and get very wroth 

 when you do not reply immediately. — Ever yours faithfully, 



T. H. Huxley. 



All are well, the children so grown you will not know them. 



/ufy i8, 1870. 



My dear Dohrn — Notwithstanding the severe symptoms of 

 " Tochterkrankheit " under which I labour, I find myself equal 

 to reply to your letter. 



The British Association meets in September on the 14th day 

 of that month, which falls on a Wednesday. Of course, if you 

 come you shall be provided for by the best specimen of Liver- 

 pool hospitality. We have ample provision for the entertain- 

 ment of the " distinguished foreigner." 



Will you be so good as to be my special ambassador with 

 Haeckel and Gegenbaur, and tell them the same thing ? It would 

 give me and all of us particular pleasure to see them and to take 

 care of them. 



But I am afraid that this wretched war will play the very 

 deuce with our foreign friends. If you Germans do not give 



* Mikluko-Maclay, a Russian naturalist, and close friend of 

 Haeckel's, who later adventured himself alone among the cannibals 

 of New Guinea. 



