2 Thomas Henry Huxley 



or private endowments, are ready to help every 

 capable boy, as far as Huxley was helped, and in his 

 progress from boyhood to supreme distinction, there is 

 nothing that cannot be emulated by every boy at school 

 to-day. The minds of human beings when they are 

 born into the world are as naked as their bodies ; it 

 matters not if parents, grandparents, and remoter an- 

 cestors were unlettered or had the wisdom of all the 

 ages, the new mind has to build up its own wisdom 

 from the beginning. We cannot even sa}^ with cer- 

 tainty that children inherit mental aptitudes and capac- 

 ities from their parents ; for as tall sons may come 

 from short parents or beautiful daughters from ugly 

 parents, so we msLy find in the capacities of the parents 

 no traces of the future greatness of their children. 

 None the less it is interesting to learn what we can 

 about the parents of great men ; and Huxley tells us 

 that he thinks himself to have inherited many charac- 

 ters of his body and mind from his mother. 



Thomas Henr}^ Huxley was born on the 4th of 

 May, 1825, at Ealing, then a little country village, 

 now united to London as a great suburb. He was the 

 seventh child of George Huxle}^ who was second 

 master at the school of Dr. Nicholson at Ealing. In 

 these days private schools of varying character were 

 very numerous in England, and this establishment 

 seems to have been of high-class character, for Cardinal 

 Newman and many other distinguished men received 

 part of their education there. His mother, whose 

 maiden name was Rachel Withers, was, he tells us 

 himself : * 



* This and many other details in this chapter are taken from 

 an autobiographical sketch in the first volume of Huxley's col- 

 lected essays published by Macmillan, London, 1894. 



