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Page 33
If scientific subjects came up in conversation, the luminous style, so
familiar in his written work, reappeared in talk.
Yet it has more than that. You cannot listen to him without
thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the
solid beautiful nature than of the intellectual gifts, more of
his manly simplicity and sincerity than of all his knowledge
and his long services.
But in the intermediate period, from about 1860 onwards, the unceasing
rush of occupation rendered it very difficult to keep in touch with
his friends. On his initiative a small dining club of scientific
friends and allies was established. Almost all these close friends
were members of the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its
meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel
before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were
inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would
have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous _x_ Club, a name
singularly appropriate on the principle of _lucus a non lucendo_ to a
club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth.
Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society
being no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--"we finally
accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the _x_
Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have
no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by
acclamation."
Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends,
Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John
Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution.
George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of
Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after
the return of the _Rattlesnake_ to England. Herbert Spencer, the
philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends
of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry
at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of
Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards
Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich,
entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William
Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member,
elected by the rest at the first meeting.
Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the
articles to a scientific Encyclop�dia: six were Presidents of the
British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France;
and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign
Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting
though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it
was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the
scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all
animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the
great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but
one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence
on the progress of scientific organization.
The first meeting took place on November 3, 1864; nearly nineteen
years passed before the circle was broken by the death of
Spottiswoode. Proposals were made to fill the gap with a new friend,
but, as the _raison d'�tre_ of the club had been simply the personal
attachment of the original nine, the project fell through. Finally,
after Hirst's death in 1892, when five out of the remaining six were
living away from London and for the most part in uncertain health,
it became more and more difficult to arrange a meeting, and the club
quietly lapsed after nearly twenty-eight years of existence.
Guests were often entertained at the _x_ dinners, men of science or
letters of almost every nationality--a delightful and quite informal
mode of personal intercourse. In the summer, also, the _x_ often made
a week-end expedition into the country or up the river, in which the
wives of the married members took part, the formula for the invitation
being _x's + yv's_.
XV
CHARLES DARWIN
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