THE MAN 



49 



bearded, but only patched up, he perforce took life a 

 little easier. In 1874 he followed-up Tyndall's 

 famous Presidential Address at the Belfast meeting of 

 the British Association with a lecture on " Animal 

 Automatism," which underwent the usual misin- 

 terpretation attending any presentment of psychical 

 activity in mechanical terms. In 1870, when lectur- 

 ing before the Cambridge Young Men's Christian 

 Society, Huxley had made the life and philosophy of 

 Descartes the text of insistence on the duty of doubt 

 as a condition of reaching certainty ; and now, before 

 a presumably more scientific audience, he showed 

 what significant contributions that master-mind had 

 made to our knowledge of the physiology of the 

 nervous system. The resulting intrusion of the biolo- 

 gist into the domain of metaphysics, which theology 

 had so long annexed, aroused the old antagonism, and 

 Huxley had again to combat the passion and preju- 

 dice which his famous " lay sermon," on " The 

 Physical Basis of Life," had aroused in Edinburgh in 

 1868. 



The summer of 1875 found him in that city lec- 

 turing on Natural History on behalf of Sir (then Pro- 

 fessor) Wyville Thomson, who was absent on the 

 Challenger expedition. In a letter which Huxley 

 received from Thomson in August, doubts were 

 thrown on Huxlev's theory of the organic character 



