THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



FEBRUARY, 1901. 

 HUXLEY'S LIFE AND WOEK.* 



By the Right Honorable Lord AVEBURY, D. C. L., LL. D. 



I ACCEPTED with pleasure the invitation of your Council to deliver 

 the first Huxley lecture, not only on account of my affection and 

 admiration for him and my long friendship, but it seemed also especially 

 appropriate as I was associated with him in the foundation of this 

 Society. He was President of the Ethnological Society, and when it was 

 fused with the Anthropological we, many of us, felt that Huxley ought 

 to be the first President of the new Institute. No one certainly did so 

 more strongly than your first President, and I only accepted the honor 

 when we found that it was impossible to secure him. 



But the foundation of our Institute was only one of the occasions 

 on which we worked together. 



Like him, but, of course, far less effectively, from the date of the 

 appearance of the 'Origin of Species/ I stood by Darwin and did my 

 best to fight the battle of truth against the torrent of ignorance and 

 abuse which was directed against him. Sir J. Hooker and I stood by 

 Huxley's side and spoke up for Natural Selection in the great Oxford 

 debate of 1860. In the same year we became co-editors of the 'Natural 

 History Review.' 



Another small society in which I was closely associated with Huxley 

 for many years was the X Club. The other members were George Busk, 

 secretary of the Linnean Society; Edward Frankland, president of 

 the Chemical Society; T. A. Hirst, head of the Eoyal Naval College 

 at Greenwich; Sir Joseph Hooker, Herbert Spencer, W. Spottiswoode, 



* The first 'Huxley Memorial Lecture' of the Anthropological Institute, delivered on Novem- 

 ber 13, 1900. 



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