40 



BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



said and written, but we must admire Huxley's valiant services 

 none the less. A reformer must be an extremist, and Huxley 

 was often extreme, but he never said what he did not believe to 

 be true. If it is easy for you and for me to say what we think 

 in print and out of print now, it is because of the battles fought 

 by such men as Huxley and Haeckel. When Huxley began his 

 great crusade, the air was full of religious intolerants and, what 

 is quite as bad, scientific shams. If Huxley had entered the 

 contest carefully and guardedly, he would have been lost in the 

 enemy's ranks ; but he struck right and left with sledge-hammer 

 blows, whether it was a high dignity of the Church or of the 

 State. Just before the occasion of one of his greatest contests, 

 that with Gladstone in the pages of the Contemporary Review, 

 Huxley was in Switzerland completely broken down in health, 

 and suffering from torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had written 

 one of his characteristically brilliant articles upon the close cor- 

 respondence between the Order of Creation as revealed in the 

 first chapter of Genesis and the Order of Evolution as shown 

 by modern biology. " When this article reached me," Huxley 

 told me, " I read it through, and it made me so angry that I 

 believe it must have acted upon my liver. At all events, when 

 I finished my reply to Gladstone I felt better than I had for 

 months past." 



Huxley's last public appearance was at the meeting of the 

 British Association at Oxford. He had been very urgently 

 invited to attend, for exactly a quarter of a century before the 

 Association had met at Oxford, and Huxley had had his famous 

 encounter with Bishop Wilberforce. It was felt that the anni- 

 versary would be an historic one, and incomplete without his 

 presence, and so it proved to be. Huxley's especial duty was 

 to second the vote of thanks for the Marquis of Salisbury's 

 address, — one of the invariable formalities of the opening 

 meeting of the Association. The meeting proved to be the 

 greatest one in the history of the Association. The Sheldonian 

 theatre was packed with one of the most distinguished scientific 

 audiences ever brought together, and the address of the Marquis 

 was worthy of the occasion. The whole tenor of it was the 

 unknown in science. Passing from the unsolved problems of 



