24 THE entomologist's record. 



§)bitiutrn. 



THE RIGHT HON. THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, 

 LL.D., Ph.D., D.C.L., M.D., F.R.S., &c. 



Born May 1st, 1825. Died June 29th, 1895. 



Another of the earhest teachers of the scientific doctrine of the 

 evohition of organic beings has passed away in the person of Professor 

 Huxley. Lyell, Darwin, Tyndall, Hehnholz have all pre-deceased 

 him, and of the great expounders of the doctrine of evolution in its 

 earliest days only Wallace and Spencer are left. When one considers 

 how few of our religious teachers accepted the doctrine of evolution in 

 the early days, we cannot help feeling satisfaction that the last religious 

 rites were performed by Mr. Llewellyn Davies, one of the first to 

 accept the principles of the doctrine of evolution. 



At this time we can hardly recognise the difficulty of the position 

 occupied by the earliest philosophical biologists. Brought up in the 

 creed of the fixity, the immutability of species, Darwin's Origin of 

 Species gave them the clue to a logical conception which had until 

 then remained a mystery, inexplicable, inscrutable. At this time 

 Huxley held the professional chair of pabeontology, and lecturer on 

 natural history in the Royal School of Mines. His preliminary 

 training, as well as his inherent capacity for probing into the mysteries 

 of relationships and their significance, made him one of the very first 

 to accept generally the Darwinian theory of descent, and from this 

 time he became a greater exponent of the facts involved than hia 

 master, pushing the theory to its logical conclusion, and showing none 

 of the hesitation which Darwin himself shoAved, although the hitter's 

 halting action was perhaps necessary and led persons to weigh carefully 

 a theory which almost everyone regarded with prejudice. Huxley's 

 lectures " On the relations of man to the lower animals " pushed the 

 matter forward, and hastened the time when the principle of evolution 

 became a fixed part of the biologist's creed, a result which would have 

 come about much more slowly had it not been for the position Huxley 

 took with regard to it; and settled in the mind of almost every thoughtful 

 biologist the fact that whatever assumptions in the Origin of 

 Sj^eriei might be disproved, whatever supposed facts should be proved 

 erroneous, yet the theory of the evolution of organic life would never, 

 in its broad lines, be shaken. 



Huxley was a born fighter, a keen controversialist, and undoul)tedly 

 a perfect idealist. His position with regard to the religious question on 

 the first School Board for London is sufficient proof of this. Nothing 

 is more painful than to listen to a narrow-minded bigot to-day, or to 

 hear his animadversions on the impossibility of reconciling a belief in 

 the broad facts of evolution (and even in its details) with a fine 

 idealism. The life of Professor Huxley, and those of many other of our 

 leading men, prove the absolute possibility. No one felt more than 

 he " the sense of an open secret which man cannot penetrate," and 

 " in which lies the essence of all religion." His scientific position was 

 sound and dominant ; he looked upon " scepticism as the highest 

 duty," and upon " blind faith as an unpardonable sin." That is the 

 position of the scientific world of to-day ; no teaelier has done more to 

 inculcatethe lesson than Thomas Henry Huxley, liy whose death the 

 world has lost one of its greatest men, 



