1895. ] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 41 
this section of the Academy, if we failed to join in the tributes 
which are being paid to him in different parts of the world. 
In his memory I do not offer a formal address this evening, 
but as one of his students, would present some personal reminis- 
cences of his characteristics as a teacher, and some of the most 
striking features of his life and work. 
Huxley was born in 1825. Like Goethe, he inherited from 
his mother his brilliantly alert powers of thought, and from his 
father, his courage and tenacity of purpose, a combination of | 
qualities which especially fitted him for the period in which he 
was to live. There is nothing striking recorded about his boy- 
hood as a naturalist. He preferred engineering, but was led into 
medicine. 
At the close of his medical course he secured a navy medical 
post upon the “ Rattlesnake.” This brought with it, as to Dar- 
win, the training of a four years voyage to the South Seas off 
eastern Australia and west Guinea—a more liberal education to 
a naturalist than any university affords, even at the present day. 
This voyage began at twenty-one, and he says of it: ‘ But, 
apart from experience of this kind and the opportunity offered 
for scientific work to me, personally, the cruise was extremely 
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline, to 
be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessi- 
ties, to find out how extremely worth living life seemed to be, 
when one woke from a night’s rest on a soft plank, with the sky 
for a canopy and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for 
breakfast, and more especially to learn to work for what I got 
for myself out of it. My brother officers were as good as sail- 
ors ought to be and generally are, but naturally, they neither 
knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood 
why I should be so zealous in the pursuit of the objects which 
my friends, the middies, christened ‘ Buffons.’ after the title con- 
spicuous on a volume of the ‘ Suites a Buffon,’ which stood in a 
prominent place on my-shelf in the chart-room.” 
As the result of this voyage of four years numerous papers 
were sent home to the Linnzan Society of London, but few 
were published; upon his return, his first work, Upon 
the Anatomy and Affinities of the Medusex, was declined for 
publication by the Admiralty; a fortunate circumstance, for it 
led to his quitting the navy for good and trusting to his own re- 
sources. Upon publicaton (1849) this memoir at once established 
his scientific reputation at the early age of twenty-four, just as 
Richard Owen had won his spurs by his ‘Memoir on the 
Pearly Nautilus.’ In 1852 Huxley’s preference as a biologist 
was to turn back to physiology, which had become his favorite 
