Born, at Ealing, 4 May 1825. At school there. Studied medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. M.B., London, 1845. Assistant-surgeon to H. M. S. “Victory,” 1846; to H. M. S. “Rattlesnake,” 1847–50. F.R.S., 1851; Medal, 1852. Prof. of Nat. Hist. at Royal School of Mines, 1854; Fullerian Prof. to Royal Institution, 1854; Examiner to London Univ., 1854. Croonian Lecturer to Royal Soc., 1858. Prof. of Comparative Anatomy to Royal Coll. of Surgeons, 1863–70. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1866. Pres. Geological Soc., 1869. Edited “Journal of the Ethnological Soc.” (with G. Busk and Sir J. Lubbock), 1869–70. Pres. Ethnological Soc., 1870. Pres. British Association, 1870. Memb. of London School Board, 1870–72. Lord Rector of Aberdeen Univ., 1872–74. Sec. of Royal Soc., 1873. Wollaston Medal, Geol. Soc., 1876. Hon. LL.D., Dublin, 1878; Hon. LL.D., Cambridge, 1879; Hon. Ph.D., Breslau; Hon. M.D., Würzburg. Corresponding member of many foreign scientific bodies. Member of various scientific and educational commissions. Knight of Pole Star of Sweden. Fellow of Eton Coll., 13 May 1879, afterwards Governor. Memb. of Senate of London Univ., 29 Aug. 1883. Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, 1881–1885. Rede Lecturer, Camb., June 1883. Pres. Royal Soc., July 1883–1885. F.R.C.S., 1884. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 17 June 1885. Trustee of British Museum, 29 Feb. 1888. Privy Councillor, Aug. 1892. Romanes Lecturer, Oxford, May 1893. Frequent contributor to periodicals. Died, 29 June 1895. Works: “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences,” 1854; “The Oceanic Hydrozoa,” 1859; “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,” 1863; “On our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature,” 1863; “Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy,” 1864; “An Elementary Atlas of Comparative Osteology,” 1864; “Catalogue of the … Fossils in the Museum of Practical Geology” (with R. Etheridge), 1865; “Palæontologia Indica: Vertebrate Fossils,” 1866; “Lessons in Elementary Physiology,” 1866; “An Introduction to the Classification of Animals,” 1869; “Protoplasm: the Physical Basis of Life,” 1869; “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews,” 1870 (“Essays,” selected from preceding, 1871); “A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals,” 1871; “On Yeast,” 1872; “Critiques and Addresses,” 1873; “A Course of Practical Instruction In Elementary Biology” (with H. N. Martin), 1875; “A Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals,” 1877; “American Addresses,” 1877; “Physiography,” 1877; “Hume,” 1879; “Science Primers: Introductory,” 1880; “The Crayfish,” 1880; “Science and Culture,” 1881; “Inaugural Address to Fishery Congress,” 1883; “Essays upon some Controverted Questions,” 1892; “Evolution and Ethics,” 1893; “Collected Essays” (9 vols.), 1893–94. He translated: Koelliker’s “Manual of Human Histology” (with G. Busk), 1853–54; Von Siebold’s “On Tape and Cystic Worms,” 1857; edited: Prescott’s “Strong Drink and Tobacco Smoke,” 1869; “Science Primers” (with Prof. Roscoe and B. Stewart), 1872, etc.; and contributed prefatory notes to various scientific publications.

Personal

  Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

  To me his whole nature, intellectual and moral, presented a singular unity; both elements appeared to be in perfect harmony with each other, and the distinctive note of both was the combination of strength and simplicity. From this source was derived the manly dignity of his bearing, the uncompromising directness of his thought, and the enviable lucidity of his style. No subtle analysis is needed to explain his character, the beauty of which consisted in being completely natural.

  As I recall the hours spent with him, first of all the memory of his charming personality presents itself, and in this respect, no man I have ever met surpassed him. To go further and name his chief characteristics, I should place his ability, his honesty, and his courage, next in order. His marvelous ability no one will question. One qualified to judge has said, that, in his intellectual grasp, Huxley was the greatest man of the century. His honesty, in the broadest sense of the word, was the dominant feature of the man. His love of truth for its own sake, wherever it might lead him, was one of the strongest elements in his character, and this resulted not only in his well-known intellectual honesty, but also in his hatred of the opposite, wherever found. His courage, especially the courage of his convictions, is known to all, and has borne good fruits. Every man of science to-day is indebted to Huxley for no small part of the intellectual freedom he enjoys.

  On the platform Mr. Huxley was a commanding figure. He had in him the gift of oratory, had he cared to cultivate it…. I used always to admire the simple and business-like way in which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated anything like display, and would have none of it…. The square forehead, the square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet of the gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength…. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything—look, gesture, speech.

  I shall best describe the impression Huxley made on me by contrasting it with the general idea which I, in common no doubt with many another, had formed of him. He always wrote, as Darwin has said, with his pen dipped in aqua fortis, and one naturally conceived of him as a combative and even as an aggressive man. Moreover the layman’s idea of the professional man of science generally includes something of the pedantic. One anticipates that his conversation, however instructive, will deal largely with every technical subject in very technical language. Again, the tone of some of the essays to which I have referred was unquestionably Voltairian. All the greater was my surprise to find the three elements of pugilist, pedant, and scoffer not only not prominent, but conspicuous by their absence. In their place was a personality of singular charm. External gifts of manner and presence, and powers of general conversation which would have ensured popularity to any mere man of the world, were combined with those higher endowments—including great breadth of culture as well as the acquirements of a distinguished specialist—to which no mere man of the world could aspire…. His appearance is well known. Above the middle height, the white hair without parting brushed straight back, the lips firm and slightly compressed; a very mobile expression; and I would add (what the current photographs do not represent), eyes full of fire, rather deep-set beneath bushy eyebrows, and a look of keenest interest in all around him, often of great wistfulness. Both in his manner and in his appearance there was marked distinction and dignity. The general impression left by his face was certainly one of intellectual force and activity rather than of scorn. His conversation was singularly finished and (if I may so express it) cleancut; never long winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations.

  It was on the 22d of February, 1859, that I was introduced to him in the Palæontological and Mineral Gallery of the British Museum in Great Russell Street, by the then keeper of that department…. Huxley was then in his thirty-fourth year. He had a well-knit, strong frame, rather tall than short, with deep-set dark eyes, bright and full of expression. His hair was black and rather long, and he wore whiskers, his chin and upper lip being shorn. His manner was dignified with a slight reserve, yet, withal, kindly, even at this first interview…. Two characteristics specially struck me. The first was remarkable mobility of his countenance—the way in which his face would “light up,” and the rapid changes of expression it could assume as the character of the conversation changed. The second was the frankness and fulness with which his judgments about certain problems were expressed.

  Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared that old age found him ever learning. Not indeed with the fiery earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied. History and philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading in these [1892] later years. Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the struggle which had now passed into other hands, still ready to strike a blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University reform. His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the occupation of former days. The day began as early; he never relaxed from the rule of an eight o’clock breakfast. Then a pipe and an hour and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay. Then a short expedition around the garden…. Then would follow another spell of work till near one o’clock; the weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two. However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the seawall always offered the possibility of a constitutional. But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk…. After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular arm-chair, with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and again scoring a passage for future reference, or jotting a brief note on the margin. At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke before going to bed.

  It is not only because we, many of us, loved him as a friend, not only because we all of us recognize him as a great naturalist, but also because he was a great example to us all, a man who did his best to benefit the people, that we are here to do honor to his memory to-day.

  Huxley was of middle stature and rather slender build. His face, as Professor Ray Lankester described it, was “grave, black-browed, and fiercely earnest.” His hair, plentiful and worn rather long, was black until in old age it became silvery white. He wore short side whiskers, but shaved the rest of his face, leaving fully exposed an obstinate chin, and mobile lips, grim and resolute in repose, but capable of relaxation into a smile of almost feminine charm. He was a very hard worker and took little exercise. Professor Howes describes a typical day as occupied by lecture and laboratory work at the College of Science until his hurried luncheon; then a cab-drive to the Home Office for his work as Inspector of Fisheries; then a cab home for an hour’s work before dinner, and the evening after dinner spent in literary work or scientific reading. While at work, his whole attention was engrossed, and he disliked being disturbed…. He was devoted to music, regarding it as one of the highest of the æsthetic pleasures…. He had a hot temper, and did not readily brook opposition, especially when that seemed to him to be the result of stupidity or of prejudice rather than of reason, and his own reason was of a very clear, decided, and exact order.

  Huxley was above all things a man absolutely simple and natural; he never posed, was never starched, or prim, or on his good behavior; and he was nothing if not playful…. If absolute loyalty to truth, involving complete self-abnegation in the face of the evidence, be the ideal aim of the scientific inquirer, there have been few men in whom that ideal has been so perfectly realized as in Huxley. If ever he were tempted by some fancied charm of speculation to swerve a hair’s breadth from the strict line of fact, the temptation was promptly slaughtered and made no sign. For intellectual integrity he was a spotless Sir Galahad. I believe there was nothing in life which he dreaded so much as the sin of allowing his reason to be hoodwinked by personal predilections, or whatever Francis Bacon would have called “idols of the cave.”

  As a lecturer he was simply perfect: clear, incisive, illuminating, admirably adapting his words to the calibre of his audience. If he and I had sparring matches in the press or face to face, it was only an incident which I shared in common with others of every school and of any opinion. Huxley was a born controversialist,—“a first-class fighting man,”—whether the subject was science, theology, or metaphysics, and his skill as a debater has no doubt given a somewhat artificial rank to his purely scientific work. Personally, as his letters and the memoir by his son would show, he was a brilliant companion, and if the objects of his attacks were seldom delighted with his vivacity, his many friends and the bystanders greatly enjoyed it. He would fly at a Positivist with even more zest than at a bishop; nor did he always observe the rule laid down by Justice Stephen, one of his colleagues in the Metaphysical Society, that “dog should not bite dog!” Huxley was always ready to go for mastiff, bulldog, or terrier. He was proud of having added the term Agnostic to the language of philosophy; and he never seemed to learn that no mere negative could be a title worthy of a serious philosopher.

  In spite of the immense amount of work he contrived to perform, Huxley never enjoyed robust health after the accidental poisoning already mentioned. Fresh air and some daily exercise were necessary in order to ward off digestive difficulties, accompanied by lassitude and depression of a severe kind; but fresh air and exercise are the most difficult of all things for a busy man in London to obtain. The evil effects of a sedentary life had shown themselves at the very beginning of his work in London, and they increased year by year. At the end of 1871 he was forced to take a long holiday; but this produced only a temporary improvement, and finally symptoms of cardiac mischief became too evident to be neglected. For this reason he gave up his public work in 1885, and in 1890 he finally left London, living thenceforward at Eastbourne.

  Beyond all doubt he never had any organic disease; the supposed dilation of the heart was even laughed at by Sir Henry Thompson a few years before his death. And yet from the age of fourteen he was a great sufferer…. Huxley’s eye-strain symptoms correspond in a general way to those of others but with the inevitable differences and peculiarities of all biologic phenomena. We must remember that his extraordinary energy of mind and body gave him noteworthy powers of resistance and recuperation. This demonstrates all the more convincingly the single nature and cause of his sufferings. The immediate cessation of the effects of eye-strain when he walked from ten to sixteen miles a day, or climbed mountains, or tramped the moors, shows at once the natural ruggedness and health of all his organs, and the single cause of his ill-health.

  Darwin realized to the full the essential strength of Mr. Huxley’s nature; he knew, as all the world now knows, the delicate sense of honour of his friend, and he was ever inclined to lean on his guidance in practical matters, as on an elder brother.

General

  No man is more disliked and dreaded by the orthodox than Thomas Huxley…. It would be wrong to regard Huxley merely as a scientific man. He is likewise a literary man, a writer. What he writes would be worth reading for its style and its expression alone, were it of no scientific authority; whereas we all know perfectly well that scientific men generally are read only for the sake of what they teach, and not at all because of their manner of teaching it. Huxley is a fascinating writer, and has a happy way of pressing continually into the service of strictly scientific exposition illustrations caught from literature and art—even from popular and light literature.

  Huxley’s works on the comparative anatomy of the Vertebrata are the only ones which can be compared with the otherwise incomparable investigations of Carl Gegenbaur. These two enquiries exhibit, particularly in their peculiar scientific development, many points of relationship…. More important than any of the individual discoveries which are contained in Huxley’s numerous less and greater researches on the most widely different animals are the profound and truly philosophical conceptions which have guided him in his inquiries, have always enabled him to distinguish the essential from the unessential, and to value special empirical facts chiefly as a means of arriving at general ideas. Those views of the two germinal layers of animals which were published as early as 1849 belong to the most important generalisations of comparative anatomy…. His treatment of the celebrated vertebral theory of the skull, in which he first opened out the right track, following which Carl Gegenbaur has recently solved in so brilliant a manner this important problem, and above all his exposition of the Theory of Descent and its consequences, belong to this class. After Charles Darwin had, in 1859, reconstructed this most important biological theory, and by his epoch-making theory of Natural Selection placed it on an entirely new foundation, Huxley was the first who extended it to man, and in 1863, in his celebrated three Lectures on “Man’s Place in Nature,” admirably worked out its most important developments.

  Whenever Professor Huxley enters on the defence of his science, as distinguished from the exposition of it, there are traces in his language of the gaudium certaminis which has found expression in so many hard-fought fields in his own country, and which has made him perhaps the most formidable antagonist, in so far as dialectics go, that the transcendental philosophers have ever encountered. He is, par excellence, a fighting man, but certainly his pugnacity diminishes neither his worth nor his capacity.

  Huxley is an able, well-read, industrious, and conscientious biologist, and has a boldness of utterance and an instinct in favor of fair dealing and equal rights, along with a genuine hatred of humbug and superstition. If his argument for evolution is inconclusive, the fault is in the theory rather than in its advocate, who has given the best possible presentation of it in the space at his command, and on the line of argument which he adopted.

  Professor Huxley has now, in this work on Hume, given his own philosophy, which is substantially that of Hume and James Mill, with some not very valuable suggestions from Bain, and a criticism now and then derived from Descartes and Kant, of whose profounder principles he has in the meanwhile no appreciation. It is expounded in the form of an epitome of the system of the Scottish sceptic with constantly interspersed criticisms of his own. His style is not that usually supposed to be philosophic; it is not calm or serene or dignified; but it clearly expresses his meaning, and it is graphic, living, and leaping. He shows everywhere great acuteness, and the shrewdness of one who is not to be taken in by show and pretension, or awed by authority. No man is quicker in starting an objection, which, however, may be of a surface character, and not penetrating into the heart of the subject. I can not discover in his speculations the calmness of one who is waiting for light, or the comprehension of one who goes round the object examined and views it on all sides.

  Professor Huxley is always an interesting writer, whatever may be his theme. He never fails to be clear and forcible, and he is usually both vivacious and amusing. It is true, his positiveness makes him defiant and contemptuous of men and opinions of whom and of which he has very little knowledge, and ought to say little or nothing…. Professor Huxley may not inaptly be styled the William Cobbett of our current philosophical radicalism. He is like Cobbett in acuteness, directness, humor, and earthliness. He is like Cobbett in the clearness, directness, and vigor of his style. Above all, he is like Cobbett in being never weary of “having a fling at the parsons.”… We appreciate and enjoy Professor Huxley’s acuteness and wit, without a thought of whom or what he strikes; but we cannot enjoy his superficial ignorance or shallow appreciation of considerations to which men of the highest rank in the world of thought have attached supreme importance.

  The eye is as clear for seeing and the arm as strong for hitting as they have always been, and on every page [“Science and Culture”] we meet with new instances of that same versatility of learning, force of thought, and brilliancy of style which, while producing so wide an influence on the science and philosophy of our time, have justly placed this distinguished leader of both in a class sui generis as an expositor.

  On the subject of natural law, especially in its relation to ethics, I owe more to Professor Huxley than to any one else. He has been the first to state with perfect clearness the true relation of man to nature, and though his statement of the case is neither devotional nor enthusiastic it disengages us from what is untenable in natural religion and sets human ethics on a higher plane. I value especially his Romanes Lecture of 1893.

  Writes in a manner rather awkward and clumsy [“Science and Christian Tradition”]; he jokes a great deal, but “wi’ deeficulty,” and, much as he writes about demonology, I see in him no signs of a technical acquaintance with the subject, or of wide reading in a theme which, as Littré says, has been most sketchily treated.

  Professor Huxley loved to throw down the glove to those who seemed to him to bar the way against the exploring genius of a very daring nature. But, none the less, he had that in him which often spurred him on to renounce his own most cherished canons of judgment and most approved repudiations of faith. Before that unseen player, whom he recognized as so utterly unknown and unknowable that he contrasted him almost scornfully with the God of Christian creeds, he sometimes invited us all to bow our heads in acts of true adoration. And so long as he could combine his love of Christ with some sort of defiance of conventional Christianity, he did not hesitate to prostrate himself before the Being whose normal nature subdued him into a feeling of awe for which he could find no adequate utterance, and in the presence of which, physical wonders lost their impressiveness, and the ethics of tribunal evolution, to which he subscribed, found themselves so utterly bereft of all sublimity, that they seemed the pallid ghosts of the vision and the thought of Christ.

  I entertain the most sincere admiration for Professor Huxley. I admire him as a passed-master of his craft; as a man in the foremost ranks of science; as a consummate reasoner; as an indefatigable worker and a fearless controversialist. Few things have given me greater pleasure than the reading of his “Essays on Controverted Questions.” As an evolutionist and agnostic I find myself in harmony with his teaching. In a word, I may venture to call myself a humble disciple of Professor Huxley.

  His eagerness to penetrate the deeper mysteries may perhaps have sometimes led him astray; while his superficial acquaintance with some subjects on which he professed to make authoritative statements, exposed him to the severe criticism which he occasionally merited and received from Owen and other contemporaries. But his influence on progress cannot be measured solely by his own writings. He inspired many younger workers, by his personal example and advice, to follow the same line of research; and he left the Geological Survey well equipped with an accomplished naturalist, who has worthily followed in his footsteps.

  Like other great biologists whose career was opened by an exploring expedition, Huxley had an early view of the varieties of mankind which turned his mind with keen interest to Anthropology. The time when his influence was rising to its full height in the scientific world, was in England full of difficulty as well as promise to the systematic study of man, and at this critical period he was able to render services not to be forgotten…. It need hardly be said that Huxley, a scientific fighter if there ever was one, was in his element in resisting any attempt to overbear the new Anthropology by philosophical declamation or claim of authority.

  There has not been by any means a unanimous expression among liberal people of admiration for Huxley. He trod on the theoretical toes of various schools of freethinkers; he repudiated the materialistic as well as the Christian flag, the atheistic along with the theistic; he would not join the Liberationists to disestablish the Church, and he held ideas of the parental functions of the State, which, while they offended the anti-vaccinationists and individualists, fell short of the friendship of socialists. Myself a personal-liberty man. I dissent strongly from some of his sociology. But what of that? All of these differentiations represent the man. That was Huxley. Had he been able to work in any harness, or bear any label, he would have been another man; and though the favored clan might have rejoiced in a powerful chief, the empire of thought would never have known its unique figure, its finest free lance. You who see, or think you see, faults in a great man, remember the profound truth of Shakespeare: “Best men are moulded out of faults.”

  The history of scientific progress has been marked by a few periods of intellectual fermentation when great bounds have been taken forward and a complete revolution ensued. Very few have been such, but in one the name of Huxley must be ever conspicuous. It was as a lieutenant of the organizer of that revolution that he appeared, but unquestionably without him it would have been long delayed, and it was through his brilliant powers of exposition that the peoples of the English-speaking lineage soon learned to understand, to some extent, what evolution was and, learning, to accept it.

  A great number of brilliant essays and lectures were composed by him on different parts of what may be called the debatable land between science, philosophy, and theology. And one of his most characteristic and masterly single studies was a little book on Hume, contributed to the series of “English Men of Letters” in 1879. This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not have been open in substance to the charge which the bolder and more thorough-going defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, that it committed the logical error of demanding submission on the part of supernaturalism to laws and limits to which, by its very essence, supernaturalism disclaimed allegiance. But the form of it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much, and had borrowed weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and Father as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries, “preciousness” and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley.

  It is of the utmost interest to trace the influence of Darwin upon Huxley, his great General in the numerous controversial battles which had to be fought before the new views were to secure a fair hearing and, at length, complete success. Now that we are quietly enjoying the fruit of his many victories, we are apt to forget how much we owe to Huxley, not only for evolution, but for that perfect freedom in the expression of thought and opinion which we enjoy. For Huxley fought on wider issues than those raised by evolution, wide as these are; and with a success so great that it is inconceivable that any new and equally illuminating thought which the future may hold in store for us, will meet with a reception like that accorded to the “Origin of Species.”

  Professor Huxley’s Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics” deservedly attracted a large amount of attention on its appearance. That attention was due not only to the importance of the subject handled and the reputation of the lecturer, but quite as much to the breadth and scope of the treatment, to the nobility of tone and the deep human feeling which characterised a singularly impressible utterance. Popular interest was also excited by the nature of the conclusion reached, which in the mouth of the pioneer and prophet of evolution, had the air of being something like a palinode. Criticisms of the lecture appeared at the time by Mr. Leslie Stephen in the “Contemporary Review,” and by Mr. Herbert Spencer in a letter to the “Athenæum;” and many discussions appeared in theological quarters. But the subject as a whole was perhaps dismissed from public attention before its significance had been exhausted, or indeed properly grasped. Professor Huxley’s argument and the criticisms it called forth illuminate most instructively some deep-seated ambiguities of philosophical terminology, and at the same time bring into sharp relief the fundamental difference of standpoint which divides philosophical thinkers. The questions at issue, moreover, are not merely speculative, already they cast their shadow upon literature and life.

  Huxley produced so great an effect on the world as an expositor of the ways and needs of science in general, and of the claims of Darwinism in particular, that some, dwelling on this are apt to overlook the immense value of his direct original contributions to exact science. The present volume and its successors will, we trust, serve to take away all excuse for such a mistaken view of Huxley’s place in the history of biological science. They show that quite beyond and apart from the influence exerted by his popular writings, the progress of biology during the present century was largely due to labours of his of which the general public knew nothing, and that he was in some respects the most original and most fertile in discovery of all his fellow-workers in the same branch of science.

  Huxley’s lifelong devotion to the task of teaching the right method of using our reason in the search for truth has been so fruitful that the success or failure of his attempts to teach the application of this method to specific problems is a matter of very subordinate importance. As he was not only a man and a citizen, but, above all, a naturalist, peculiar interest attaches to his utterances on the problems of biology, although his various essays on this subject differ so much in perspective that their effect upon many thoughtful readers has proved to be practically equivalent to inconsistency. It is easy to show that, in this case, as in others, the responsibility rests with the reader and not with the author.

  Probably the most influential disciple and exponent of the theory of descent was the great English zoologist, Thomas Huxley…. Huxley’s palæontological works, like those of Gaudry and Cope, are mostly devoted to the vertebrate animals, and are distinguished by his remarkable acuteness of observation and his genius for inductive combination. His determination of the genealogy of the horse, his elucidation of the genetic relations of birds and reptiles, his memoir on Crossopterygia, are among the classical productions of palæontological and zoological science.

  Huxley’s resolution to be strictly logical and to be clear before anything only forces him to exert his powers of vivifying the subject by happy illustration or humorous side-lights, or sometimes by outbursts of hearty pugnacity, and now and then by the eloquent passages, the more effective because under strict control, which reveal his profound sense of the vast importance of the questions at issue. He had one disadvantage as compared with Swift. If Swift wanted a fact, he had not many scruples about inventing it, whereas Huxley’s most prominent intellectual quality was his fidelity to fact, or to what he was firmly convinced to be fact…. He was not an indiscriminate philanthropist; he hated a rogue and did not love a fool; and he held that both genera were pretty numerous. But he was a most heartily loyal citizen; doing manfully the duties which came his way and declining no fair demand upon his co-operation…. Men of science have their weaknesses and temptations. They are not always more free than their literary brethren from petty jealousies and unworthy lust for notoriety. Huxley’s life shows an admirable superiority to such weaknesses. His battles, numerous as they were, never led to the petty squabbles which disfigure some scientific lives. Nobody was ever a more loyal friend.

  Huxley’s work has been incorporated in the very body of science. A large number of later investigators have advanced upon the lines he laid down; and just as the superstructures of a great building conceal the foundations, so later anatomical work, although it has only amplified and extended Huxley’s discoveries, has made them seem less striking to the modern reader. The present writer, for instance, learned all he knows of anatomy in the last ten years, and until he turned to it for the purpose of this volume he had never referred to Huxley’s original paper. When he did so, he found from beginning to end nothing that was new to him, nothing that was strange: all the ideas in the memoir had passed into the currency of knowledge and he had been taught them as fundamental facts. It was only when he turned to the text-books of anatomy and natural history current in Huxley’s time that he was able to realise how the conclusions of the young ship-surgeon struck the Fellows and President of the Royal Society as luminous and revolutionary ideas…. Huxley was a wide and omnivorous reader, and so had an unusually large fund of words at his disposal. His writings abound with quotations and allusions taken from the best English authors, and he had a profound and practical belief in the advantage to be gained from the reading of English…. Huxley’s style was a style of ideas and not of words and sentences. The more closely you analyse his pages the more certainly you find that the secret of the effect produced on you lies in the gradual development of the precise and logical ideas he wished to convey, in the brilliant accumulation of argument upon argument, in the logical subordination of details to the whole, in fact, in the arts of the convinced, positive, and logical thinker.

  Approaching what we may term the problem of Huxley by the way of such an account of his work as Mr. Mitchell has set forth, the reader will find his way to the true value of the letters which give an inner view of a wonderfully active and efficient life. Probably no other man of action, so far as his intimate relations are concerned, has ever been more faithfully portrayed or would leave a nobler impression of his essential quality. After reading this evidently incomplete collection of hastily written letters, none of them bearing the least sign that they were meant for more than the moment’s use, the reader will find that he has been in the presence of a singularly strong personality. He is likely to feel that the man who wrote them was in his nature a true builder; one of those who send their influence far. Those who knew Huxley and watched his activities could not help seeing past the commonplace effects with which his endless controversies surrounded him, that he was one of the larger figures of his century.

  To regard Huxley as a compound of Boanerges and Iconoclast is to show entire misapprehension of the aims which inspired his labours. In Biology his discovery of the structor of the Medusæ laid the foundations of modern zoology; his theory of the origin of the skull gave a firm basis to vertebrate morphology; and his luminous exposition of the pedigree of man imported order where confusion had reigned. In the more important matter of Education he formulated principles whose adoption would bring out the best that is in every scholar, and inspire him with love of whatever “is of good report;” while his invention of the laboratory system of zoological teaching has been adopted with the best results in every school and university of repute.

  In many minds the name of Huxley has for its most prominent association controversialism; and though his constructive work was far more important, there is no denying that he spent no small part of his time and energy in fighting, and that he thoroughly enjoyed it. He was the champion of the scientific point of view, as contrasted with the metaphysical or the theological; he looked forward to the time when the scientific interpretation “will organize itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole,” but we misunderstand his controversialism if we forget the motive that prompted it—“the fanaticism of veracity.” Whether we consider his famous duel with Bishop Wilberforce at the British Association meeting in 1860, or his criticism of Owen, or his battles with the bishops and Mr. Gladstone, or any other of the many controversies, we cannot but feel that they express no merely polemical spirit but that of an earnest truth-seeker who hit hard out of conviction, who never sought to destroy without also replacing. Huxley’s style is especially distinguished by lucidity, accuracy, and force; and no small part of the wide extension of scientific interest has been due to its charm.