776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. 



By Prof. MICHAEL FOSTEK. 



TWO scenes in Huxley's life stand out clear and full of mean- 

 ing amid my recollections of him, reaching now some forty 

 years back. Both took place at Oxford, both at meetings of the 

 British Association. The first, few witnesses of which now re- 

 main, was the memorable discussion on Darwin in 1860. The 

 room was crowded though it was a Saturday, and the meeting 

 was excited. The bishop had spoken ; cheered loudly from time 

 to time during his speech, he sat down amid rapturous applause, 

 ladies waving their handkerchiefs with great enthusiasm ; and in 

 almost dead silence, broken merely by greetings which, coming 

 only from the few who knew, seemed as nothing, Huxley, then 

 well-nigh unknown outside the narrow circle of scientific work- 

 ers, began his reply. A cheer, chiefly from a knot of young men 

 in the audience, hearty but seeming scant through the fewness of 

 those who gave it, and almost angrily resented by some, welcomed 

 the first point made. Then as, slowly and measuredly at first, 

 more quickly and with more vigor later, stroke followed stroke, 

 the circle of cheers grew wider and yet wider, until the speaker's 

 last words were crowned with an applause falling not far short of, 

 indeed equaling, that which had gone before, an applause hearty 

 and genuine in its recognition that a strong man had arisen among 

 the biologists of England. 



The second scene, that of 1894, is still fresh in the minds of all. 

 No one who was present is likely to forget how, when Huxley 

 rose to second the vote of thanks for the presidential address, the 

 whole house burst into a cheering such as had never before been 

 witnessed on any like occasion, a cheering which said, as plainly 

 as such things can say, "This is the faithful servant who has 

 labored for more than half a century on behalf of science with his 

 face set firmly toward truth, and we want him to know that his 

 labors have not been in vain." Nor is any one likely to forget 

 the few carefully chosen, wise, pregnant words which fell from 

 him when the applause died away. Those two speeches, the one 

 long and polemical, the other brief and judicial, show, when taken 

 together, many of the qualities which made Huxley great and 

 strong. 



Among those qualities perhaps the most dominant, certainly 

 the most effective as regards his influence on the world, were, on 

 the one hand, an alertness, a quickness of apprehension, and a 

 clear way of thinking, which, in dealing with a problem, made 

 him dissatisfied with any solution incapable of rigid proof and 

 incisive expression ; he seemed always to go about with a halo of 



