Januaey 31, 1896.] 



SGIENGE. 



153 



sonally we may not be agnostic ; we may dis- 

 agree with mucli that he has said and writ- 

 ten, but we must admire Huxley's valiant 

 services none the less. A reformer must 

 be an extremist, and Huxley was often ex- 

 treme, but he never said what he did not 

 believe to be true. If it is easy for you and 

 for me to say what we think, in print and 

 out of print now, it is because of the battles 

 fought by such men as Huxley and Haeckel. 

 When Huxley began his great crusade 

 the air was full of religious intolei'ants, and, 

 what is quite as bad, scientific shams. If 

 Huxley had entered the contest carefully 

 and guardedly, he would have been lost in 

 the enemies' ranks, but he struck right and 

 left with sledge hammer blows, whether 

 it was a high dignity of the Church or of 

 the State. Just before the occasion of one 

 of his greatest contests, that with Gladstone 

 in the pages of the Contemporary Beview, 

 Huxley was in Switzerland, completely 

 broken down in health and suffering from 

 torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had writ- 

 ten one of his characteristically brilliant 

 articles upon the close correspondence be- 

 tween the Order of Creation as revealed in 

 the first chapter of Genesis and the Order 

 of Evolution as shown by modern biology. 

 "When this article reached me," Huxley 

 told me, " I read it through and it made me 

 so angry that I believe it must have acted 

 upon my liver. At all events, when I fin- 

 ished my reply to Gladstone I felt better 

 than I had for months past." 



Huxley's last public appearance was at 

 the meeting of the British Association at 

 Oxford. He had been very urgently invited 

 to attend, for, exactly a quarter of a century 

 before, the Association had met at Oxford 

 and Huxley had had his famous encounter 

 with Bishop Wilberforce. It was felt that 

 the anniversary would be an historic one 

 and incomplete without his presence, and 

 so it proved to be. Huxley's especial duty 

 was to second the vote of thanks for the 



Marquis of Salisbury's address — one of the 

 invariable formalities of the opening meet- 

 ing of the Association. The meeting proved 

 to be the greatest one in the history of the 

 Association. The Sheldonian theatre was 

 packed with one of the most distinguished 

 scientific audiences ever brought together, 

 and the address of the Marquis was worthy 

 of the occasion. The whole tenor of it was 

 the unknown in Science. Passing from the 

 unsolved problems of Astronomy, Chemis- 

 try and Physics, he came to Biology. With 

 delicate irony he spoke of the ' comforting 

 loord, evolution,'' and passing to the Weis- 

 mannian controversy implied that the dia- 

 metrically opposed views so frequently ex- 

 pressed nowadays threw the whole process 

 of evolution into doubt. It was only too 

 evident that the Marquis himself found no 

 comfort in Evolution, and even entertained 

 a suspicion as to its probability. It was 

 well worth the whole journey to Oxford to 

 watch Huxley during this portion of the 

 address. In his red doctor- of-laws gown, 

 placed upon his shoulders by the very body 

 of men who had once referred to him as ' a 

 Mr. Huxley,' he sank deeper into his chair 

 upon the very front of the platform and 

 restlessly tapped his foot. His situation 

 was an unenviable one. He had to thank 

 an ex-Prime Minister of England and pres- 

 ent Lord Chancellor of Oxford University 

 for an address, the sentiments of which were 

 directly against those he himself had been 

 maintaining for twenty- five years. He said 

 afterwards that when the proofs of the Mar- 

 quis' address were put in his hands the day 

 before, he realized that he had before him a 

 most delicate and difficult task. 



Lord Kelvin, one of the most distin- 

 guished living physicists, first moved the 

 vote of thanks, but his reception was 

 nothing to the tremendous applause which 

 greeted Huxley in the heart of that Uni- 

 versity whose traditional principles he had 

 so long been opposing. Considerable anx- 



