II 



THE DISCOVERER 



In the preface to the eighth volume of his Collected 

 Essays Huxley says : — 



It must be admitted that the popularisation of 

 science, whether by lectures or by essays, has its 

 drawbacks. Success in this department has its perils 

 for those who succeed. The u people who fail " take 

 their revenge by ignoring all the rest of a man's work, 

 and glibly labelling him a mere populariser. If the 

 falsehood were not too glaring, they would say the 

 same of Faraday, and Helmholtz, and Kelvin. 1 



They said it of Huxley. In a recent compilation 

 entitled One Hundred and One Great Writers^ issued 

 under the editorship of so well-equipped a scholar as 

 Dr. Richard Garnett, Huxley's work is described as 

 " that of the populariser ; the man who makes few 

 original contributions to science or thought, but states 

 the discoveries of others better than they could have 

 stated them themselves. " And, doubtless, that is a very 

 common impression about a man the titles of whose 

 original scientific papers 2 fill ten pages of the appendix 



> P. vii. 



2 Now collected in four volumes under the editorship of Sir 

 Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester. 



64 



