xvi INTRODUCTION 



Jowett, the great scholar, and Tyndall, the scientist, who 

 had been to Huxley more like a brother than a friend. 

 But he was not to mourn them long, for in less than two 

 years, after a short illness, Huxley died peacefully on 

 June 29, 1895, at Eastbourne. 



n 



After reading the preceding sketch, one is apt to ask 

 what sort of man Huxley was. Since he performed so 

 much work and expended so much energy, was he merely 

 a stupendous, dry-as-dust, cold logic-engine? Was he 

 really a man as other men are? To the first question, 

 the answer is an emphatic no; to the second an equally 

 emphatic yes. At the same time, however, Huxley was 

 a perfect illustration of his own saying, ' ' Perhaps the 

 most valuable result of all education is the ability to make 

 yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be 

 done, whether you like it or not." He was, it is true, 

 so filled with abundant enero-y that no one can wonder 

 at his saying, when he saw the tugs moving the larger 

 boats in New York Harbor, doing the work of the day that 

 had to be done, "If I were not a man, I think J should 

 like to be a tug." 



But even a hasty reading of Leonard Huxley's admirable 

 Life of his father makes it clear that Thomas Huxley was 

 an all-round man, "a noble, warm-hearted human being." 

 He was a man absolutely simple and natural, witli a 

 "veritable passion for truth." In a time of deepest per- 

 sonal sorrow, when writing to a friend, he said, "If wife 

 and child, and name and fame were all to be lost to me, 

 one after the other, still I will not lie." His interc^onrse 

 with men, his letters to his friends and to his family disclose 



