536 THE JOUENEY TO PALESTINE 
To Huxley he made a similar profession of good resolutions, 
and received a reply in k nd. 
Kew : December 12, 1860. 
We are not likely to meet except at the Linnean, for I 
have inaugurated a new era in my life, and am going to take 
the world and all that is therein as coolly as I can. When 
perfect myself I shall commence operating on you. What 
is the use of tearing your life to pieces before you are 50 ? 
which you are (and I was) doing as fast as possible. 
Froyn T. H. Huxley 
Jermyn Street : December 19, I860. 
And finally as to your resolutions, my holy pilgrim, they 
will be kept about as long as the resolutions of the anchorites 
who are thrown into the busy world. Or, I won't say that, 
for assuredly you will take the world ' as coolly as you 
can ' — and so shall I. But that coolness amounts to the 
red heat of properly constructed mortals. 
It is no use having any false modesty about the matter. 
You and I, if we last ten years longer — and you by a long 
while first — will be the representatives of our respective 
lines in the country. In that capacity we shall have certain 
duties to perform, to ourselves, to the outside world, and 
to Science. We shall have to swallow praise, which is no 
great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous bastings and 
irritations, which will involve a good deal of unquestion- 
able pain. Don't flatter yourself that there is any moral 
chloroform by which either you or I can render ourselves 
insensible or acquire the habit of doing things coolly. 
It is assuredly of no great use to tear one's life to pieces 
before one is fifty. But the alternative, for men constituted 
on the high pressure tubular boiler principle hke ourselves, 
is to he still and let the devil have his own way. And I will 
be torn to pieces before I am forty sooner than see that. 
Fortified by a few months of this regime, he can point 
the moral to his friend Anderson in Calcutta (April 22, 1861) 
apropos of T. Thomson's break- down in India. 
That cursed Society of Calcutta and Sunday labour 
in entertaininpr is at the root of all the mischief, and I do 
