4 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. I 



biography, " that any portents preceded my arrival in 

 this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing 

 a traditional account of the manner in which I lost 

 the chance of an endowment of great practical value. 

 The windows of my mother's room were open, in 

 consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. 

 For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring bee- 

 hive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on 

 the window-sill, was making its way into the room 

 when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that 

 well-meaning woman had only abstained from her 

 ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled 

 on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that 

 mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far 

 more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to 

 the highest places in Church and State. But the op- 

 portunity was lost, and I have been obliged to con- 

 tent myself through life with saying what I mean in 

 the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, 

 there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of 

 advancement." 



As to his debt, physical and mental, to either 

 parent, he writes as follows : 



Physically I am the son of my mother so completely 

 even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which 

 made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had 

 when I noticed them that I can hardly find any trace of 

 my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, 

 which, unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, 

 a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which 

 unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy. 



