38 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



which reveals the natural law, but the man who looks at the 

 section. 



Huxley was not only a master in the search for truth, but in 

 the way in which he presented it, both in writing and in speak- 

 ing ; and we are assured, largely as he was gifted by nature, 

 his beautifully lucid and interesting style was partly the result 

 of deliberate hard work. He was not born to it ; some of his 

 early essays are very labored. He acquired it. He was familiar 

 with the best Greek literature, and restudied the language. He 

 pored over Milton and Carlyle and Mill. He studied the fine 

 old English of the Bible. He took as especial models Hume 

 and Hobbes, until finally he wrote his mother tongue as no 

 other Englishman wrote it. Take up any one of his essays, 

 biological, literary, philosophical; you at once see his central idea 

 and his main purpose, although he never uses italics or spaced 

 letters as many of our German masters do to relieve the 

 obscurity of their sentences. We are carried along upon the 

 broad current of his reasoning without being confused by his 

 abundant side illustrations. He gleaned from the literature of 

 all time until his mind was stocked with apt similes. Who but 

 Huxley would have selected the title " Lay Sermons " for his 

 first volume of addresses ; or, in 1880, twenty-one years after 

 Darwin's work appeared, would have entitled his essay upon 

 the influence of this work, " The Coming of Age of the Origin 

 of Species" ? Or to whom else would it have occurred to repeat 

 over the grave of Balfour the exquisitely appropriate lines : - 



" For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 

 Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer." 



Who else could have inveighed thus against modern specializa- 

 tion : " We are in the case of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of 

 the Roman citadel to the Sabines and was crushed by the weight 

 of the reward bestowed upon her. It has become impossible 

 for any man to keep pace with the progress of the whole of 

 any important branch of science. It looks as if the scientific, 

 like other revolutions, meant to devour its own children ; as if 

 the growth of science tended to overwhelm its votaries ; as 

 if the man of science of the future were condemned to diminish 



