.192 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



been shown in abortive attempts in the pages of that 

 * facetious ' journal to appraise a Roman Catholic 

 biologist at the expense of Huxley, to further de- 

 grade itself by affixing the letters * L.S.D.' to his 

 name in a character-sketch. 



His public life may be said to date from 1854. 

 The duties which he then undertook included the 

 delivery of a course of lectures to working men 

 every alternate year. Some of these models of 

 their kind have been reissued in the Collected Essays. 

 Among the most notable are those on ' Our Know- 

 ledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic 

 Nature.' At the outset of his public career lecturing 

 was as distasteful to him as in earlier years the 

 trouble of writing was detestable. But mother wit 

 and ' needs must ' trained him in a short time to win 

 the ear of an audience. One evening in 1852 he 

 made his dbut at the Royal Institution, and the 

 next day he received a letter charging him with 

 every possible fault that a lecturer could commit 

 ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in use of hands, 

 mumbling of words, or dropping them down the 

 shirt front. The lesson was timely, and its effect 

 salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and 

 it is worth recording if but as encouragement to 

 stammerers who have something to say at what 

 price he ' bought this freedom ' which held an 

 audience spellbound. How he thus held it in later 

 years they will remember who in the packed theatre 

 of the Royal Institution listened on the evening of 

 Friday, Qth April 1880, to his lecture 'On the 

 Coming of Age of the Origin of Species.' 



In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps 



