[The situation is further developed in a letter to Darwin:--]

Jermyn Street, June 22, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

I sent the books to Queen Anne St. this morning. Pray keep them as
long as you like, as I am not using them.

I am greatly disgusted that you are coming up to London this week, as
we shall be out of town next Sunday. It is the rarest thing in the
world for us to be away, and you have pitched upon the one day. Cannot
we arrange some other day?

I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for
theirs. There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal
board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that
Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were
the blackest heretics out of the list proposed, and that he was glad
to assent to your being doctored, when he got back, in order to keep
out seven devils worse than that first!

Ever, oh Coryphaeus diabolicus, your faithful follower,

T.H. Huxley.

[The choice of a subject for his Presidential Address at the British
Association for 1870, a subject which, as he put it,] "has lain
chiefly in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere