I20 NATURAL SCIENCE. August. 



I. — At the Age of Thirty-two. 



OTHERS besides those who knew, in earHer life, the great and 

 beloved chief who has so recently passed from among us, will 

 find interest in the portrait of him, at the age of thirty-two, which 

 accompanies this note (Plate xviii). It was taken in the year 1857, 

 and was one of a series of photographs of the Fellows of the Royal 

 Society, published at that date by Messrs. Maull & Polyblank. I 

 have cherished it ever since, recalling as it does to me the earliest 

 impression which his wonderful personality made on my boyish mind. 

 It shows us Huxley in the full prime of manhood — as yet unknown 

 to popular fame, and even three years later to be spoken of by the 

 Times as '' a Mr. Huxle}^" when, at the British Association meeting, 

 he demolished Dr. Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. When this 

 photograph was taken, Huxley had been only two years Professor at 

 the School of Mines ; he was seeing his "Oceanic Hydrozoa" through 

 the press, his Croonian lecture on the Vertebrate Skull was ready, 

 but not yet delivered.^ After his first lecture at the Royal Institution 

 as Fullerian Professor, only a year or two earlier, he had been so ex- 

 hausted by the nervous strain of addressing'a popular audience that he 

 had gone home to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon. He had only 

 made Darwin's acquaintance a year before the date of this portrait, 

 and the " Origin of Species" was not pubhshed till two years after it. 

 It was this grave, black-browed, fiercely earnest face, which three 

 years later turned its steady gaze on the too venturesome Bishop 

 who, in the discussion at Oxford on Darwin's views, had declared 

 that some men seemed to have special information as to their own 

 ancestry, and that he would like to hear from Mr. Huxley whether it 

 was by his grandfather's or grandmother's side that he was related to 

 an ape. Then said Huxley, in an undertone, to a friend at his side, 

 " The Lord hath delivered him into my hands," and he rose to reply. 

 " He spoke with force and eloquence and a self-restraint that gave 

 dignity to his rejoinder," says an eye-witness of the scene. According 

 to the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate (quoted by 

 Frank Darwin in his father's " Life "), the conclusion of Huxley's 

 speech was as follows : " I asserted, and I repeat, that a man would 

 have no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. 

 If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it 



1 Between the period of his return from the voyage of the " Rattlesnake " and 

 his appointment at the School of Mines (1851-1855), Huxley had produced a large 

 number of valuable memoirs on Histology and on the Structure of Invertebrata, 

 published chiefly in the Quarterly Journal 0/ Microscopical Science and in the volumes 

 of the Royal and of the Linnean Societies. This is not the place in which to enumerate 

 them ; but besides these I should like to cite especially (as showing his great 

 activity and industry) his translation in conjunction with Mr. George Busk of 

 Kulliker's " Histology," his translations in the series of " Scientific Memoirs," 

 edited by himself and Henfrey, his article in the Medico-Chirurgical Review on the 

 Cell-theory, his article " Tegumentary Organs " in Todd & 'Bovivaa.n's Cyclopadia, 

 and numerous unsigned communications to the Literary Gazette and other periodicals. 



