LITTLE them. " Had she been a man, she would have been 

 JOURNEYS leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons," 



her son used to say. 



College education was not for that goodly brood a 

 living was the first thing, so after a good drilling in the 

 three R's, Thomas Huxley was apprenticed to a phar- 

 macist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum that 

 the boy conscientiously gave to his mother. 

 Oh, if in our school-teaching we could only teach this 

 one thing : A great thirst for knowledge ! 

 But this desire we cannot impart it is trial, difficulty, 

 obstacle, deprivation, that make souls hunger and thirst 

 after knowledge. 

 Young Huxley wanted to know. 



His thoroughness in the drug-store won the admiration 

 of the doctors whose prescriptions he compounded, and 

 several of them loaned him books, took him to clinics, 

 and at seventeen we find him with a Free Scholarship 

 to Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and as- 

 sistant surgeon. 



Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the 

 Navy, and the appointment to H.M.S. " Rattlesnake," 

 bound on a four years' trip to the antipodes, all quite 

 as a matter of course. 



Life is a sequence this happened to-day because you 

 did that yesterday. To-morrow will be the result of 

 to-day < & 



The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind 

 of young Huxley. He realized that Nature was moving, 

 growing, changing all things. He had studied embry- 

 62 



