NA TURE 



145 



THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 1901. 



HUXLE V. 

 Life atid Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, F.R.S. By 



Leonard Huxley. Vol. I., pp. viii + 503 ; Vol. II., 



pp. vi + 504. (London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 



1900.) 30J'. net. 

 "y HE real life of Hu.\ley has still to be written. What 

 is wanted is a critical study of the development of 

 his striking personality and an estimate of the work of 

 his life and the effect it has produced. I have nothing 

 but praise for the two bulky volumes of the " Life and 

 Letters,'' in which a filial duty has been accomplished 

 with taste and judgment. But though they supply in- 

 valuable material they do not attempt to bring the facts 

 of either career or performance to a clear focus. 



Such a study in competent hands would be a fascinat- 

 ing undertaking. It would not merely give a picture of 

 a very remarkable man, but would give also a chapter in 

 the history of English science of supreme importance. I 

 make no pretension to ability for the task myself, even if 

 the columns of this Journal could afford the space. But 

 I shall hazard the attempt to indicate the essential points 

 which I should like to see more amply treated. I have 

 gathered the material from a pretty close study of the 

 " Life and Letters," and I have added the references of 

 volume and page to quotations, which are not always 

 easy to find, for any one who cares to verify them. 



Nothing in tracing an eventful career is so attractive 

 as speculation on the "might-have-been." It is probable, 

 however, that within narrow limits " circumstance " counts 

 for little beyond giving a dramatic touch to the story. 

 But it played its part again and again in Huxley's life 

 for what it was worth. 



His family traces back to the north-west of England, 

 where a certain fibrousness of character is commoner than 

 in the south. His father was a master in Dr. Nicholson's 

 school at Ealing, where Huxley was born in 1825. He 

 describes himself as "a thread-paper of a boy" (ii. 35) 

 with "a wild-cat element in me" (i. 5). For education 

 in the ordinary sense : — 



" I had two years of a pandemonium of a school (be- 

 tween 8 and 10), and after that neither help nor sympathy 

 in any intellectual direction till I reached manhood " 

 (ii. 145). 



The school came to grief and Huxley's father moved 

 to Coventry. Huxley was left to his own devices. What 

 they were is almost incredible ; but then he has told us that 

 " a priori reasonings are mostly bosh " (ii. 212). At twelve 

 he was sitting up in bed before dawn to read Hutton's 

 "Geology" (i. 6). His great desire was to be a mechan- 

 ical engineer ; it ended in his devotion to " the mechanical 

 engineering of living machines" (i. 7). His curiosity in 

 this direction was nearly fatal ; a post mortem he was 

 taken to between thirteen and fourteen was followed by 

 an illness which seems to have been the starting point of 

 the ill-health which pursued him all through life. At 

 fifteen he devoured Sir William Hamilton's " Logic.'' 

 Twenty years later he says :—" From that time to this 

 ontological speculation has been a folly with me " (i. 218). 

 NO. 1650, VOL. 64] 



At seventeen he came under the influence of Carlyle. 

 Nearly fifty years later he wrote : — 



" There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a 

 few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflec- 

 tion — except the sense of having worked according to 

 one's capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid 

 of cant and shams of all sorts. This was the lesson I 

 learnt from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has 

 stuck by me all my life " (ii. 268). 



At the same age he began his regular medical studies 

 at Charing Cross Hospital with his brother, to whom 

 Newman (afterwards Cardinal), who had been educated 

 at the Ealing school (i. 19), gave a testimonial. He 

 attended Lindley's lectures at the Chelsea Botanic 

 Garden and won one of the medals of the Apothecaries 

 Society. At the Medical School he studied under 

 Wharton Jones, a physiologist who never seems to have 

 attained the reputation he deserved. Perhaps he got 

 mixed up with " the other fellow,'' who, Huxley thought, 

 had " mistaken his vocation " (i. 94), an opinion in which, 

 from personal experience, I can quite agree. Of Wharton 

 Jones, Huxley says : — 



" I do not know that I ever felt so much respect for a 

 teacher before or since" (i. 21). 



At twenty he went up for his First M.B. examination 

 at the University of London, winning the gold medal for 

 anatomy and physiology. Ransom, of Nottingham, won 

 the Exhibition. Here circumstance came in. 



" If Ransom had not overworked himself .... I 

 should have obtained the Exhibition .... and should 

 have forsaken science for practice" (ii. 133). 



Would he ? 



Something had to be done to get a livelihood, and at 

 the suggestion of a fellow student, now Sir Joseph Fayrer, 

 he applied for an appointment in the Navy. Circum- 

 stance again, he came under Sir John Richardson, him- 

 self no mean naturalist, and through his influence was 

 attached to the Rattlesnake. One of the oddest things 

 about Huxley's career is the fact that almost every one he 

 had to do with turned out sooner or later to be somebody 

 notable. Through his Captain, Owen Stanley, "a 

 thorough scientific enthusiast" (i. 25), he was introduced 

 to Owen, Gray and Forbes, the first and last of whom had 

 a good deal to say to his future career. The voyage of 

 the Rattlesnake occupied four years. Huxley was twenty- 

 five on his return. Few scientific men ever used their 

 opportunities with keener sagacity. He spent no time in 

 mere collecting. But, with an instinct which appears to 

 me altogether extraordinary in one who was little more 

 than a youth fresh from a medical school, he seized upon 

 everything that was important and with regard to which 

 new ground was to be broken ; and, characteristically, 

 he steadily kept their physiological interest to the front. 

 The rest may be passed over rapidly ; he had, in a scien- 

 tific sense, his reward. His paper on the structure of the 

 Medusa? had been published during his absence in the 

 Philosophical Transactions. In this paper he laid down 

 the fundamental character of the " ectoderm and endo- 

 derm." As AUman justly remarks, " this discovery stands 

 at the very basis of a philosophic zoology" (i. 40). It 

 is not too much to say that it is the foundation of modern 

 zoological theory, and had Huxley never done anything 



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