as biologists they realized the greatness of Darwin’s vision; together they bore the brunt of the battle of the Origin at Oxford.  In seeking a good mouthpiece for scientific opinion, in reorganizing and administering the great scientific societies, in their work for scientific education, they shared the same ideas, and their friendship and Tyndall’s formed the starting-point of the x Club, with its regular meetings of old friends.  More than once they went off on a short holiday tour together, and when Huxley was invalided in 1873 it was Hooker who took charge and carried him off for a month’s active trip in the geological paradise of the Auvergne.  The care and company of so good a friend made the crowning ingredient in a most successful prescription.  And when both had retired from official life a new interest in common sprang up through Huxley’s incursion into botany.  While recruiting his health in the high Alps, his interest was aroused by the Gentians, and he wrote a valuable paper on their morphology and distribution.  This interest continued itself into the making of a rock-garden in his Eastbourne home, where, in his spare hours, he proceeded to put into happy practice Candide’s famous maxim, “Cultivons notre jardin,” and drew from this occupation the simile of the wild chalk down and the cultivated garden in his Romanes Lecture to illustrate the contrast between the cosmic process and the social organism.

Hooker often sent his friend plants from his own garden, sometimes banteringly including one which would “flourish in any neglected corner.”

An unclouded intimacy of friendship lasted to the end, and it was Hooker who received the last letter written by his friend.

Close as a brother, too, and claiming the name of brother in affectionate adoption, was John Tyndall, radiant in genial warmth and high spirits.  They, too, were at one in thoughts, sympathies, and aims; they travelled together, especially in the Alps, where Tyndall mainly carried out the investigation of certain problems in relation to the glaciers which Huxley had suggested to him, and, being “a masterful man and over-generous,” insisted that the resulting paper on glaciers should bear both their names.

Tyndall came to the School of Mines as Professor of Physics in 1859 at his friend’s instigation, and for nine years they were, as colleagues, in daily contact, and indeed were not far separated when Tyndall succeeded Faraday at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.

Tyndall, who remained a bachelor till late in middle life, always found a warm corner beside his friend’s hearth.  From the earliest days of the household in the little house at Waverley Place he was admitted to the inner circle of a lively friendship by Mrs. Huxley also, that keen judge of character, and to the children ranked as a kind of unofficial uncle.  On New Year’s Day he was chief among the two or three intimates who were bidden here, having no domestic hearth of their own, Herbert Spencer and Hirst being the other “regulars,” and later Michael Foster.