And that is all the more reason why I don’t want to stop you from working it out, or rather to make the “one erasure” you suggest.  For as to stopping you, “ten on me might,” as the navvy said to the little special constable who threatened to take him into custody.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Warmth and sea-fogs here for a variety.

[One more letter may be given from this time at Bournemouth—­a letter to his eldest daughter on the loss of her infant son:—­]

Casalini, W. Bournemouth, March 2, 1886.

It’s very sad to lose your child just when he was beginning to bind himself to you, and I don’t know that it is much consolation to reflect that the longer he had wound himself up in your heart-strings the worse the tear would have been, which seems to have been inevitable sooner or later.  One does not weigh and measure these things while grief is fresh, and in my experience a deep plunge into the waters of sorrow is the hopefullest way of getting through them on to one’s daily road of life again.  No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something, and you know, dear child, that you have these in fullest measure from us.

[On coming up to London in April he was very busy, among other things, with a proposal that the Marine Biological Association, of which he was President, should urge the Government to appoint a scientific adviser to the Fishery Board.  A letter of his on this subject had appeared in the “Times” for March 30.  There seemed to him, with his practical experience of official work, insuperable objections to the status of such an officer.  Above all, he would be a representative of science in name, without any responsibility to the body of scientific men in the country.  Some of his younger colleagues on the Council, who had not enjoyed the same experience, thought that he had set aside their expressions of opinion too brusquely, and begged Sir M. Foster, as at once a close friend of his, and one to whose opinion he paid great respect, to make representations to him on their behalf, which he did in writing, being kept at home by a cold.  To this letter, in which his friend begged him not to be vexed at a very plain statement of the other point of view, but to make it possible for the younger men to continue to follow his lead, he replied:—­]

4 Marlborough Place, April 5, 1886.

My dear Foster,

Mrs. Foster is quite right in looking sharp after your colds, which is very generous of me to say, as I am down in the mouth and should have been cheered by a chat.

I am very glad to know what our younger friends are thinking about.  I made up my mind to some such result of the action I have thought it necessary to take.  But I have no ambition to lead, and no desire to drive them, and if we can’t agree, the best way will be to go our ways separately...