146 



NATURE 



[June 13, 1901 



else he would still have retained a classical place in its 

 history. 



At twenty-six he was elected a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society. At twenty-seven he not merely received 

 the Royal medal, but was placed on the Council. 

 Certainly, half a century ago, our venerable Society 

 showed no want of alacrity in recognising rising merit. 

 And if any one wants to suggest that it has become less 

 active in that respect he may be reminded that it was 

 equally prompt in the case of Hertz. 



It is certainly a notable circumstance that three men 

 who were contemporaries and ultimately close friends, 

 Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, each began his scientific 

 career on board one of Her Majesty's ships. The 

 consequence in each case was momentous to science : 

 Darwin gave us the " Origin," Hooker a rational theory 

 of geographical distribution, Huxley a reformed zoology. 

 The odd thing is that while the two former returned con- 

 firmed naturalists the latter came back as impenitent as 

 ever, and never was of a better mind till quite the end of 

 his life. 



At the age, then, of twenty-seven Huxley had placed 

 himself with absolutely no aid in the very front rank of 

 English scientific men. "What makes," he says, " the 

 bigwigs so marvellously zealous on my behalf I know 

 not. I have sought none of them and flattered none of 

 them" (i. 78). Yet he did not emerge from the struggle 

 altogether unscathed. Writing to Kingsley some eight 

 years later he for once allows the cry of the wounded 

 heart to escape him : — 



" Kicked into the world, a boy without guide or train- 

 ing, or with worse than none, I confess to my shame 

 that few men have drank deeper of all kinds of sin than 

 I have " (i. 220). 



Frankly, I do not believe a word of it. My experience 

 of life does not lead me to think that any one who begins 

 with a rank crop of weeds is very likely to ever reap a 

 more substantial harvest. The plain fact is that the 

 mood of confession is a perilous one, and from St. 

 Augustine onwards most men who have yielded to it 

 have found a sort of painful satisfaction in painting 

 their past in the blackest colours. But I am entirely 

 unable to find any point in Huxley's youth at which I 

 can fix that outburst of the natural man. In a rather 

 serious conversation I once had with him he spoke of 

 a period in his life when he might have taken to evil 

 courses ; but he did not give me the smallest reason 

 to suppose that in the retrospect he saw more than 

 the existence of a possible crevasse in his path into 

 which he might have fallen. 



If Huxley's scientific reputation was established, his 

 material position was still unassured. " Nothing," he 

 says, "but what is absolutely practical will go down in 

 England. A man of science may earn great distinction, 

 but not bread " (i. 66). The struggle, however, in his 

 case, if sharp, was less prolonged than it has been in 

 the case of many other men. Owen got him his first 

 temporary appointment (i. 95). Edward Forbes, " a 

 regular brick " — an opinion I never heard any one gain- 

 say—backed him " through thick and thin " (i. 107). 

 He refrained, therefore, happily, from abandoning " all 

 his special pursuits and take up chemistry, for prac- 

 NO. 1650, VOL. 64] 



tical purposes " (i. 86). He had tried to get " crystal- 

 lised carbon" at fifteen (i. 10) ! 



Huxley was now thirty, and at last happily married. 

 He might have succeeded Forbes in the Edinburgh chair, 

 but " preferred to live in London on a bare sufficiency " 

 (i. 120). He settled down at the School of Mines ; his 

 ship had come into port ; what was the cargo he brought 

 with him ? As a boy he conceived a profound distrust 

 of metaphysical speculation ; at fifteen he writes in his 

 note-book, hammered out from " Novalis,'' "Philosophy 

 bakes no bread " (i. 9) ; that he stuck to to the end. From 

 Carlyle he learnt his empiricism, a determination to see 

 things as they are. From Wharton Jones he acquired 

 an exact method, and from the Rattlesnake voyage confi- 

 dence in his own powers of observation and courage to 

 criticise the word of others. And here I must interpose 

 the remark that it is difficult to estimate the services 

 which biological science in this country owes to our 

 medical schools. Up to the present time without them' 

 it would possibly not have existed amongst us at all. 

 Huxley later on was more willing than I am to kick 

 away the ladder : — 



" Our side has been too apt to look upon medical 

 schools as feeders for science. They have been so, but 

 to their detriment as medical schools. And now that 

 so many opportunities for purely scientific training are 

 afforded, there is no reason that they should remain so" 

 (ii. 310). 



For my own part, owing much to medical training, I 

 entirely dissent. The foundation of medical studies on 

 a scientific basis, far from being detrimental, has in 

 my opinion been of incalculable benefit to them. If 

 Huxley really contemplated a division between medicine 

 and science it was the worst cause he ever advocated. 



Huxley's official duties, much against the grain, brought 

 him face to face with pakeontological problems. This 

 not merely led to some of his most brilliant work, but 

 put a weapon in his hand which he used afterwards 

 with irresistible effect. 



Half a century ago Owen was the dominant, and I 

 think it must be admitted an evil, influence in the 

 English biological world. He was saturated with the 

 " naturphilosophie " and the teaching of Oken. Huxley 

 was bound to come into collision with this. The 

 Croonian Lecture in 1858, "On the theory of the verte- 

 brate skull," demolished Oken's theory, and with it 

 " fell the superstructure raised by its chief supporter, Owen, 

 'archetype' and all " (i. 141). Owen had already felt that 

 his throne was tottering and, having borrowed the lecture- 

 room in Jermyn Street for a course of lectures, boldly 

 assumed, without the smallest warrant, the title of " Pro- 

 fessor of Paheontology at the School of Mines" (i. 142). 

 For this and many subsequent proceedings of a like 

 nature the only plausible explanation that I can see is 

 lunacy. 



Here again Huxley laid one of the foundation 

 stones of modern biological science. In his paper on 

 the MedusiE he supplied the key which has unlocked 

 the secrets of embryology : his Croonian lecture, followed 

 by the work of Gegenbaur, has placed vertebrate mor- 

 phology on a scientific basis. 



This was his first conflict with scientific idealism, but 



