Decline
By 1880, the members of the X Club had prominent positions within the scientific community, and the club was highly regarded, but it was beginning to fall apart. In 1883, Spottiswoode died of typhoid and at the same time, according to Spencer, only two of the remaining eight members of the X club were in good health. Attendance at meetings began to dwindle and by 1885, Frankland and Lubbock urged for the election of new members. There was a difference of opinion on the matter and it was eventually dropped. In 1889, a rift emerged in the group when Huxley and Spencer had an argument over land nationalisation policies and refused to talk with one another.
The members of the club were growing old and during the late 1880s and early 1890s, a few of the members moved out of London. When attendance began to severely dwindle, talks of ending the club emerged. The last meeting was held unceremoniously in March 1893, and only Frankland and Hooker attended.
Read more about this topic: X Club
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)