148 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. HI. No. 57. 



At the close of his medical course he se- 

 cured a navy medical post upon the 'Eat- 

 tlesnake.' This brought with it, as to Dar- 

 win, the training of a four-years' voyage to 

 the South Seas off eastern Australia and 

 west Guinea — a more liberal education to a 

 naturalist than any university affords, even 

 at the present day. This voyage began at 

 twenty-one, and he says of it : '' But, apart 

 from experience of this kind and the oppor- 

 tunity offorded for scientific work to me, 

 personally, the cruise was extremely val- 

 uable. It was good for me to live under 

 sharp discipline, to be down on the realities 

 of existence by living on bare necessities, to 

 find out how extremely worth living life 

 seemed to be, when one woke from a night's 

 rest on a soft plank, with the sky for a can- 

 opy and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole 

 prospect for breakfast, and more especially 

 to learn to work for what I got for myself 

 out of it. My brother officers were as good 

 as sailors ought to be and generally are, but 

 naturally they neither knew nor cared any- 

 thing about my pursuits, nor understood 

 why I should be so zealous in the pursuit 

 of the objects which my friends, the mid- 

 dies, christened ' Buffons,' after the title 

 conspicious on a volume of the 'Sidtes a Buf- 

 fon,' which stood in a prominent place on 

 my shelf in the chart room." 



As the result of this voyage of four years 

 numerous papers were sent home to the 

 Linufean Society of London, but few were 

 published; upon his return his first great 

 work. Upon the Anatomy and Affinities of the 

 Medusae, was declined for publication by the 

 Admiralty — a fortunate circumstance, for it 

 led to his quitting the navy for good and 

 trusting to his own resources. Upon pub- 

 lication, this memoir at once established 

 his scientific reputation at the early age of 

 twenty-four, just as Eichard Owen had won 

 his spurs by his ' Memoir on the Pearly 

 Nautilus.' In 1852 Huxley's preference as 

 a biologist was to turn back to physiology, 



which had become the favorite study of his 

 medical course. But his fate was to enter 

 and become distinguished in a wddely dif- 

 ferent branch, which had as little attraction 

 for him as for most studeiits of marine life, 

 namely, paleontology. He says of his sud- 

 den change of base : 



"At last, in 185i, on the translation of 

 my warm friend, Edward Forbes, to Edin- 

 burgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director- 

 General of the Geological Survey, offered 

 me the post Forbes had vacated of Paleon- 

 tologist and Lecturer on Natural History. 

 I refused the former point-blank, and ac- 

 cepted the latter only provisionally, telling 

 Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils and 

 that I should give up .natural history as 

 soon as I could get a physiological post. 

 But I held the ofiice for thirty- one years 

 and a large part of my work has been 

 paleontological . ' ' 



From this time until 1885 his labors ex- 

 tended over the widest field of biology and 

 of philosophy ever covered by any natural- 

 ist, wath the single exception of Aristotle. 

 In j)hilosophy Huxley showed rare critical 

 and historical power; he made the most ex- 

 haustive study of Hume, but his own philo- 

 sophical spirit and temper was more di- 

 rectly the offspring of Descartes. Some 

 subjects he mastered, others he merely 

 touched, but every subject which he wrote 

 about he illuminated. Huxley did not dis- 

 cover or first define protoplasm, but he 

 made it known to the English-speaking 

 world as the physical basis of life; recog- 

 nizing the unity of animal and plant proto- 

 plasm. He cleared up certain problems 

 among the Protozoa. In 1849 appeared his 

 great work upon the oceanic Htjdrozoa, and 

 familiarity with these forms doubtless sug- 

 gested the brilliant comparison of the two- 

 layered gastrula to the adult hydrozoa. He 

 threw light upon the Tunicata, describing 

 the endostyle as a universal feature, but 

 not venturitig to raise the Tunicata to a 



