200 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 
contained an interesting reference to Huxley’s views 
concerning a “pre-geologic past of unknown dura- 
tion.” In the next serial number a footnote informed 
the reader that the phrase “ persistence of force,” since 
become so famous, was suggested by Huxley, as avoid- 
ing an objection which Spencer had raised to the 
current expression “conservation of force.” Further 
references to Huxley, as also to Tyndall, in the course 
of the book, left me with a vague conception of the 
three friends as, after a certain fashion, partners in the 
business of scientific research and generalization. 
Some such vague conception was developed in the 
mind of the general public into divers droll miscon- 
ceptions. Even as Spencer’s famous phrase, “survi- 
val of the fittest,” which he suggested as preferable 
to “natural selection,” is by many people ascribed to 
Darwin, so we used to hear wrathful allusions to 
“Huxley’s Belfast Address,” and similar absurdities. 
The climax was reached in 1876, when Huxley and 
his wife made a short visit to the United States. 
Early in that year Tyndall had married a daughter of 
Lord Claud Hamilton, brother of the Duke of Aber- 
corn, and one fine morning in August we were gravely 
informed by the newspapers that “ Huxley and his 
titled bride” had just arrived in New York. For our 
visitors, who had left at home in London seven goodly 
children, some of them approaching maturity, this item 
of news was a source of much merriment. 
To return to my story, it was not long before my 
notion of Huxley came to be that of a very sharply 
defined and powerful individuality; for such he ap- 
peared in his “ Lectures on the Origin of Species” and 
in his “ Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,” both 
