Write here on receiving this.  We shall take easy stages home, but I don’t know that I shall be able to give you any address.

M—­ sends heaps of love to all (including Charles [The cat.]).

Ever your loving father,

T.H.  Huxley.

Tell the “Micropholis” man that it is a fossil lizard with an armour of small scales.

CHAPTER 2.17.

1885.

[On April 8, he landed at Folkestone, and stayed there a day or two before going to London.  Writing to Sir J. Donnelly, he remarks with great satisfaction at getting home:—­]

We got here this afternoon after a rather shady passage from Boulogne, with a strong north wind in our teeth all the way, and rain galore.  For all that, it is the pleasantest journey I have made for a long time—­so pleasant to see one’s own dear native mud again.  There is no foreign mud to come near it.

[And on the same day he sums up to Sir M. Foster the amount of good he has gained from his expedition, and the amount of good any patient is likely to get from travel:—­]

As for myself I have nothing very satisfactory to say.  By the oddest chance we met Andrew Clark in the boat, and he says I am a very bad colour—­which I take it is the outward and visible sign of the inward and carnal state.  I may sum that up by saying that there is nothing the matter but weakness and indisposition to do anything, together with a perfect genius for making mountains out of molehills.

After two or three fine days at Venice, we have had nothing but wet or cold—­or hot and cold at the same time, as in that prodigious imposture the Riviera.  Of course it was the same story everywhere, “perfectly unexampled season.”

Moral.—­If you are perfectly well and strong, brave Italy—­but in search of health stop at home.

It has been raining cats and dogs, and Folkestone is what some people would call dreary.  I could go and roll in the mud with satisfaction that it is English mud.

It will be jolly to see you again.  Wife unites in love.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[To return home was not only a great pleasure; it gave him a fillip for the time, and he writes to Sir M. Foster, April 12:—­]

It is very jolly to be home, and I feel better already.  Clark has just been here overhauling me, and feels very confident that he shall screw me up.

I have renounced dining out and smoking (!!!) by way of preliminaries.  God only knows whether I shall be permitted more than the smell of a mutton chop for dinner.  But I have great faith in Andrew, who set me straight before when other “physicians’ aid was vain.”

[But his energy was fitful; lassitude and depression again invaded him.  He was warned by Sir Andrew Clark to lay aside all the burden of his work.  Accordingly, early in May, just after his sixtieth birthday, he sent in his formal resignation of the Professorship of Biology, and the Inspectorship of Salmon Fisheries; while a few days later he laid his resignation of the Presidency before the Council of the Royal Society.  By the latter he was begged to defer his final decision, but his health gave no promise of sufficient amendment before the decisive Council meeting in October.