1876 VISITS AMERICA 



493 



the part of the trustees ? I am minded to do it on our way back 

 from the south, but don't much like taking money for the per- 

 formance. Tell me what you think about this at once, as I must 

 reply. 



This visit to America had been under discussion for some 

 time. It is mentioned as a possibility in a letter to Darwin 

 two years before. Early in 1876 Mr. Frederic Harrison 

 was commissioned by an American correspondent — who, by 

 the way, had named his son Thomas Huxley — to give my 

 father the following message : — " The whole nation is elec- 

 trified by the announcement that Professor Huxley is to 

 visit us next fall. We will make infinitely more of him than 

 we did of the Prince of Wales and his retinue of lords and 

 dukes." Certainly the people of the States gave him an 

 enthusiastic welcome ; his writings had made him known 

 far and wide ; as the manager of the Californian department 

 at the Philadelphia Exhibition told him, the very miners of 

 California read his books over their camp fires ; and his 

 visit was so far like a royal progress, that unless he entered 

 a city disguised under the name of Jones or Smith, he was 

 liable not merely to be interviewed, but to be called upon 

 to " address a few words " to the citizens. 



Leaving their family under the hospitable care of Sir W. 

 and Lady Armstrong at Cragside, my father and mother 

 started on July 27 on board the Germanic, reaching New 

 York on August 5. My father sometimes would refer, half 

 jestingly, to the trip as his second honeymoon, when, for 

 the first time in twenty years, he and my mother set forth 

 by themselves, free from all family cares. And indeed, there 

 was the underlying resemblance that this too came at the 

 end of a period of struggle to attain, and marked the be- 

 ginning of a more settled period. His reception in America 

 may be said to emphasise his definite establishment in the 

 first rank of English thinkers. It was a signal testimony 

 to the wide extent of his influence, hardly suspected, in- 

 deed, by himself ; an influence due above all to the fact that 

 he did not allow his studies to stand apart from the moving 

 problems of existence, but brought the new and regener- 

 ating ideas into contact with life at every point, and that his 



