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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 57. 



seemed to image his wonderfully calm^ and 

 deep vision of nature and at the same time 

 to emit benevolence. Huxley's piercing 

 black eyes and determined and resolute 

 face were full of admiration, and, at the 

 same time, protection of his older friend. 

 He said afterwards, " you know I have to 

 take care of him, in fact, I have alwaj^s 

 been Darwin's bulldog," and this exactly 

 expressed one of the many relations which 

 existed so long between the two men. 



Huxley was not always fortunate in the 

 intellectual calibre of the men to whom he 

 lectured in the Eoyal School of Mines. 

 Many of the younger generation were study- 

 ing in the universities, under Balfour at 

 Cambridge, and under Eolleston, at Oxford. 

 However, Saville Kent, C. Lloyd Morgan, 

 George B. Howes, T. Jeffrey Parker and 

 W. Newton Parker are representative biolo- 

 gists who were directly trained by Huxley. 

 Many others, not his students, have ex- 

 pressed the deepest indebtedness to him. 

 Among these especially are Prof. E. Ray 

 Lankester, of Oxford, and Prof. Michael 

 Foster, of Cambridge. Huxley once said 

 that he had ' discovered Foster.' He not 

 only singled men out, but knew how to di- 

 rect and inspire them to investigate the 

 most pressing problems of the day. As it 

 was, his thirty-one years of lectures would 

 have produced a far greater effect if they 

 had been delivered from an Oxford, Cam- 

 bridge or Edinburgh chair. In fact, Hux- 

 ley's whole life would have been different, 

 in some ways more effective, in others less 

 so, if the universities had welcomed the 

 young genius who was looking for a post and 

 even cast his ej^es toward America in 1850, 

 but in those early days of classical prestige 

 both seats of learning were dead to the sci- 

 ence which it was Huxley's great service ia 

 suppoi't of Darwin to place beside physics, in 

 the lead of all others in England. More- 

 over, Oxford, if not Cambridge, could not 

 long have sheltered such a wolf in the fold. 



What Haeckel did for evolution in G-er- 

 many, Huxley did in England. "As the 

 earliest and most ardent supporter of Dar- 

 win and the theory of descent, it is remark- 

 able that he never gave an unreserved sup- 

 port to the theory of natural selection as 

 all-suiBcient. Twenty-five j^ears ago, with 

 his usual penetration and prophetic insight, 

 he showed that the problem of variation 

 might, after all, be the greater problem; 

 and only three years ago, in his ' Romanes 

 Lecture,' he disappointed many of the dis- 

 ciples of Darwin by declaring that natural 

 selection failed to explain the origin of our 

 moral and ethical nature. Whether he was 

 right or wrong, we will not stop to discuss, 

 but consider the still more remarkable con- 

 ditions of Huxley's relations to the theorj^ of 

 evolution. As expositor, teacher, defender, 

 he was the high priest of evolution. From 

 the first he saw the strong and weak points 

 of the special Darwinian theory ; he wrote 

 upon the subject for thirty years, and yet 

 he never contributed a single original or 

 novel idea to it ; in other words, Huxley 

 added vastly to the demonstration, but 

 never added to the sum of either theory or 

 working hypothesis, and the contemporary 

 history of the theory proper could be writ- 

 ten without mentioning his name. This lack 

 of speculation upon the factors of evolution 

 was true throughout his whole life ; in the 

 voyage of the ' Rattlesnake ' he says he did 

 not even thtuk of the species problem. His 

 last utterance regarding the causes of evolu- 

 tion appeared in one of the Reviews as a pass- 

 ing criticism of Weismann's finished philoso- 

 phy, in which he implies that his own phi- 

 losophy of the causes of evolution was as far 

 off as ever ; in other words, Huxley never 

 fully made up his mind or committed him- 

 self to any causal theory of development. 



Taking the nineteenth century at large, 

 outside of our own circles of biology, Hux- 

 ley's greatest and most permanent achieve- 

 ment was his victory for free thought. Per- 



