Edinburgh, May 16, 1875.

My dearest Jess,

Your mother’s letter received this morning reminds me that I have not written to “Cordelia” (I suppose she means Goneril) by a message from that young person—­so here is reparation.

I have 330 students, and my class is the biggest in the University—­but I am quite cast down and discontented because it is not 351,—­being one more than the Botany Class last year—­which was never so big before or since.

I am thinking of paying 21 street boys to come and take the extra tickets so that I may crow over all my colleagues.

Fanny Bruce is going to town next week to her grandmother’s and I want you girls to make friends with her.  It seems to me that she is very nice—­but that is only a fallible man’s judgment, and Heaven forbid that I should attempt to forestall Miss Cudberry’s decision on such a question.  Anyhow she has plenty of energy and, among other things, works very hard at German.

M—­ says that the Roottle-Tootles have a bigger drawing-room than ours.  I should be sorry to believe these young beginners guilty of so much presumption, and perhaps you will tell them to have it made smaller before I visit them.

A Scotch gentleman has just been telling me that May is the worst month in the year, here; so pleasant! but the air is soft and warm to-day, and I look out over the foliage to the castle and don’t care.

Love to all, and specially M—.  Mind you don’t tell her that I dine out to-day and to-morrow—­positively for the first and last times.

Ever your loving father,

T.H.  Huxley.

[However, the class grew without such adventitious aid, and he writes to Mr. Herbert Spencer on June 15:—­]

...I have a class of 353, and instruct them in dry facts—­particularly warning them to keep free of the infidel speculations which are current under the name of evolution.

I expect an “examiner’s call” from a Presbytery before the course is over, but I am afraid that the pay is not enough to induce me to forsake my “larger sphere of influence” in London.

[In the same letter he speaks of a flying visit to town which he was about to make on the following Thursday, returning on the Saturday for lack of a good Sunday train:—­]

May hap I may chance to see you at the club—­but I shall be torn to pieces with things to do during my two days’ stay.

If Moses had not existed I should have had three days in town, which is a curious concatenation of circumstances.

[As for health during this period, it maintained, on the whole, a satisfactory level, thanks to the regime of which he writes to Professor Baynes:—­]

I am very sorry to hear that you have been so seriously ill.  You will have to take to my way of living—­a mutton chop a day and no grog, but much baccy.  Don’t begin to pick up your threads too fast.

No wonder you are uneasy if you have crabs on your conscience. [I.e. an article for the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”] Thank Heaven they are not on mine!