vi SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY 



nineteenth century. With the path thus cleared by early 

 leaders, the mid-century scientists advanced with no uncertain 

 step. Lyell, Darwin, Tyndall, Spencer, Faraday, Clerk Max- 

 well, Kelvin, and Huxley are some of the great names of the, 

 period. 



HUXLEY'S LIFE 



Prominently identified with this movement that stamped 

 the nineteenth century as an age of scientific progress was 

 Thomas Henry Huxley. His life story, as related in his 

 "Autobiography/ 7 is a brief record of some of the chief inci- 

 dents of his career ; but his modesty compelled him to omit 

 many interesting and significant features and to touch lightly 

 upon other matters that deserved more than passing notice. 

 As the " Autobiography" was written six years before his 

 death, some account must here be taken of the closing years 

 of his life, as well as of some of the omitted incidents of his 

 earlier manhood. 



Born May 4, 1825, at Ealing, near London, the son of a 

 schoolmaster, he was given the education that an ordinary boy 

 of the middle class was accustomed to receive. He was an in- 

 different student, but an omnivorous reader. Pursuing the 

 study of medicine, he completed the course at the age of twenty, 

 receiving from the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School the 

 degree of M.B., and a gold medal for excellence in Anatomy 

 and Physiology. In the following year (1846) he was ap- 

 pointed assistant-surgeon of the surveying ship Rattlesnake, 

 and made a three years' cruise, principally on the eastern coast 

 of Australia. There without books or advisers, at times with 

 his microscope lashed to the mast to steady it, he made a study 

 of jellyfish and polyps. His first important memoir, the result 

 of this investigation, "On the Anatomy and the Affinities of 

 the Family of the Medusae/' called by one writer " the founda- 



