OBJECT OF THE CLUB 545 
The club met 240 times, the average attendance being seven 
up to 1883, and the whole nine assembling on twenty-seven 
occasions. Hooker himself attended 169 times. The original 
circle remained unbroken for nearly nineteen years. Spottis- 
woodedied in 1883 ; Buskin 1886. The meetings, wrote Huxley, 
* were steadily continued for some twenty years, before our ranks 
began to thin ; and one by one, geistige Naiuren such as those 
for which the poet so willingly paid the ferryman,^ silent but 
not unregarded, took the vacated places.' Proposals were 
often made to fill up the gaps, especially when ill-health drove 
other members to live out of town ; but as the x really had ' no 
raison d'etre beyond the personal attachment of its original 
members,' it seemed to some that new members, however 
personally welcome, could not be admitted without destroying 
the unique relationship of friendship joined to a common 
experience of struggle and success. This feeling was expressed 
by Huxley in a letter to Frankland of 1886 : 
Nobody could have foreseen or expected twenty years 
ago when we first met, that we were destined to play the 
parts we have since played, and it is in the nature of things 
impossible that any of the new members proposed (much 
as we may like and respect them all), can carry on the work 
which has so strangely fallen to us. 
An axe with a new head and a new handle may be the 
same axe in one sense, but it is not the familiar friend with 
which one has cut one's way through wood and brier. 
And to Hooker two years later : 
The club has never had any purpose except the purely 
personal object of bringing together a few friends who did 
not want to drift apart. It has happened that these cronies 
had developed into bigwigs of various kinds, and therefore 
the club has incidentally — ^I might say accidentally- — ^had 
a good deal of influence in the scientific world. But if I had 
1 Nimm dann Fiilirmann, 
Nimm die Miethe 
Die ich gerne dreifach biete ; 
Zwei, die eben iiberfuhren 
Waren geistige Naturen. 
