REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 219 
few letters passed back and forth with the lapse of 
years, the last one (in 1894) inquiring when I was 
likely to be able to come and visit him in the pretty 
home which he had made in Sussex, where he was 
busy with “digging in the garden and spoiling grand- 
children.” When the news of the end came, it was 
as a sudden and desolating shock. 
There were few magazines or newspapers which did 
not contain articles about Huxley, and in general 
those articles were considerably more than the cus- 
tomary obituary notice. They were apt to be more 
animated than usual, as if they had caught something 
from the blithe spirit of the man; and they gave so 
many details as to show the warm and widespread 
interest with which he was regarded. One thing, 
however, especially struck me. While the writers of 
these articles seemed familiar with Huxley’s philo- 
sophical and literary writings, with his popular lec- 
tures on scientific subjects and his controversies with 
sundry clergymen, they seemed to know nothing what- 
ever about his original scientific work. It was really 
a singular spectacle, if one pauses to think about it. 
Here are a score of writers engaged in paying trib- 
ute to a man as one of the great scientific lights of the 
age, and yet, while they all know something about 
what he would have considered his fugitive work, not 
one of them so much as alludes to the cardinal 
achievements in virtue of which his name marks an 
epoch! It is very much as if the biographers of 
Newton were to enlarge upon his official labours at 
the Mint and his theory of light, while preserving a 
dead silence as to gravitation and fluxions. A few 
words concerning Huxley’s work will therefore not 
