xii Introduction 



your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur; 

 territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about 

 which hangs a true sublimity and the terror of overhang- 

 ing fate, is, What are you going to do with all these 

 things? The one condition of success, your sole safe- 

 guard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the 

 individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it 

 can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever 

 station of society they are to be found, and the universities 

 ought to be and may be the fortresses of the higher life of 

 the nation." 



Huxley was never very strong. In 1888 he wrote to a 

 friend : " Dame Nature has given me a broad hint that I 

 have had my innings, and, for the rest of my time, must 

 be content to look on at the players." The essays alone, 

 however, that he wrote after 1888 would have given him 

 a place among the intellectual leaders of the century. 

 Three days before his death he writes as jauntily as ever: 

 " At present I don't feel at all like ' sending in my 

 checks,' and without being over sanguine I rather incline 

 to think that my native toughness will get the best of it." 

 The end came quietly on June 29, 1895. At his request 

 these lines, written by Mrs. Huxley, were inscribed upon 

 his tombstone: 



"Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; 

 For still He giveth His beloved sleep, 

 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best." 



Of Huxley's busy career the Autobiography gives us 

 only glimpses here and there. We learn from it, however, 

 that his chief interests lay in " the working out of the 

 wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands 

 of diverse living constructions " of nature, and in promot- 

 ing " the application of scientific methods of investigation 



