Letter from T. H. Huxley to Charles Robert Darwin 3 February 1880
Science and Art Department | South Kensington
Feby. 3. 1880
My dear Darwin
I read Butler’s letter & your draft and Litchfield’s letter last night; slept over them, and after lecturing about Dogfish & Chimæræ (subjects which have a distinct appropriateness to Butler) I have read them again—and I say, without the least hesitation, burn your draft & take no notice whatever of Mr Butler until the next edition of your book comes out—when the briefest possible note explanatory of the circumstances—will be all that is necessary1
Litchfield ought hereafter to be called ‘the judicious’ as Hooker was (I don’t mean Sir Joe but the divine)—2 To my mind nothing can be sounder than his advice and “I am a man of (sor)rows and acquainted with (coming to) grief”3
I am astounded at Butler—who I thought was a gentleman though his last book appeared to me to be supremely foolish— Has Mivart bitten him & given him Darwinophobia?4 It is a horrid disease & I would kill every son of a
I found running loose with it—without mercy—
But dont you worry as to these things Recollect what old Goethe said about his Butlers & Mivarts
“Hat doch der Wallfisch seine Laus Muss auch die meine haben.”5
We are as jolly as people can be who have been living in the dark for a week & I hope you are all flourishing
Ever Yours | T H Huxley
Notes
1
See letter to T. H. Huxley, 2 February 1880. CD enclosed a copy of the Athenæum containing Samuel Butler’s letter, CD’s second draft letter to the Athenæum (see letter to H. E. Litchfield, 1 February [1880], enclosures 1 and 3), as well as the first enclosure of the letter from H. E. Litchfield, [1 February 1880]. Dogfish sharks and chimaeras are types of cartilaginous fishes; Huxley grouped sharks and chimaeras into a single class, Chondrichthyes (T. H. Huxley 1880b, p. 660). Huxley also alludes to the Chimaera of Greek mythology, since the term, used figuratively, refers to a wild fancy or unfounded conception (OED).
2
Richard Buckley Litchfield had advised against responding to Butler, arguing that no reply was needed (letter from H. E. Litchfield, [1 February 1880], enclosure 1). Joseph Dalton Hooker was a close friend of both CD and Huxley. The theologian Richard Hooker had been characterised as ‘judicious’ by many different religious groups (ODNB).
3
Huxley alludes to the biblical verse, ‘He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3).
4
Butler’s book was Evolution, old and new (Butler 1879). CD had had a similar falling out with St George Jackson Mivart after Mivart suggested in an anonymous essay review in the Quarterly Review that, in an article on marriage, George Howard Darwin spoke in an approving strain of the encouragement of vice to check population growth ([Mivart] 1874, p. 70, G. H. Darwin 1873; see Correspondence vols. 22 and 23).
5
After all, the whale has its louse, so I must also have mine (German; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in ‘Pseudo-Wanderer’; see, for example, Goethe 1845–6, 1: 138). The poem refers to Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Pustkuchen. On Pustkuchen’s critique of Goethe and Goethe’s response, see Bahr 1998, pp. 7–8, 52–5.