HUXLEY 39 



Although Huxley was as kind and genial a friend and com- 

 panion as Darwin himself, and that I was quite at ease with 

 him in his family circle, or in after-dinner talk with a few of 

 his intimates (and although he was two years younger than 

 myself), yet I never got over a feeling of awe and inferiority 

 when discussing any problem in evolution or allied subjects 

 — an inferiority which I did not feel either with Darwin or Sir 

 Charles Lyell. This was due, I think, to the fact that the 

 enormous amount of Huxley's knowledge was of a kind of 

 which I possessed only an irreducible minimum, and of which 

 I often felt the want. In the general anatomy and physiology 

 of the whole animal kingdom, living and extinct, Huxley was 

 a master, the equal — perhaps the superior — of the greatest 

 authorities on these subjects in the scientific world; whereas 

 I had never had an hour's instruction in either of them, had 

 never seen a dissection of any kind, and never had any incli- 

 nation to practise the art myself. Whenever I had to touch upon 

 these subjects, or to use them to enforce my arguments, I had 

 to get both my facts and my arguments at second hand, and 

 appeal to authority both for facts and conclusions from them. 

 And because I was thus ignorant, and because I had a positive 

 distaste for all forms of anatomical and physiological experi- 

 ment, I perhaps over-estimated this branch of knowledge and 

 looked up to those who possessed it in a pre-eminent degree as 

 altogether above myself.^] 



With Darwin and Lyell, on the other hand, although both 

 possessed stores of knowledge far beyond my own, yet I did 

 possess some knowledge of the same kind, and felt myself in 

 a position to make use of their facts and those of all other 

 students in the same fields of research quite as well as the 

 majority of those who had observed and recorded them. I 

 had, however, very early in life noticed, that men with im- 

 mense knowledge did not always know how to draw just 

 conclusions from that knowledge, and that I myself was 

 quite able to detect their errors of reasoning. I also found 

 that when, in my early solitary studies in physics or 

 mechanics, I came upon some conclusion which seemed to 

 me, for want of clear statement in the books at my command, 



