The Right Hon. T. H Huxley, D.C.L., F.RS. 451 



The Right Hon. T. H. Huxley, D.C.L., F.R.S., &o. 



Thomas Henry Huxley was in many respects the most 

 prominent English naturalist of our time. His early 

 training was that of a medical man, but his first serious 

 employment was in the scientific study of the pelagic 

 animals of the Southern Ocean, when assistant-surgeon of 

 H. M. S. Rattlesnake in her surveying expedition in the 

 years 1846-50. This work he did so ably as at once to 

 establish a high scientific reputation, though the govern- 

 ment, on his return, declined to publish the results. Hux- 

 ley was not officially naturalist to the expedition, and was 

 at the time unknown to fame. During his absence he had 

 sent several communications to the Linnean Society, but, 

 as he says, " with the same result as Noah when he sent 

 the raven out of the ark." At length, in 1849, he sent a 

 paper to the Royal Society which was accepted and 

 printed ; but this was only at the end of the voyage. He 

 was, however, in 1854, appointed, on recommendation of 

 Sir H. De la Beche, naturalist to the Geological Survey, 

 and Professor of Palaeontology in the Royal School of 

 Mines, and thenceforth held with much ability many and 

 varied scientific and educational positions. Active and 

 versatile in thought, and gifted with remarkable powers 

 of expression and illustration as a writer, he was now a 

 biologist, now a geologist or an educationist, or a social 

 reformer, a philosopher, or a theologian or anti-theologian, 

 as the case might be. He was the prominent and success- 

 ful advocate of the Darwinian evolution before the court 

 of public opinion, and gave to that revival of an old 

 philosophy a vitality and an interest into which it could 

 never have been galvanized by Darwin or Spencer or 

 Wallace or Haeckel. 



In all his various roles he was clever, incisive, subtle, 

 intensely interesting, and full of unexpected and startling 

 trains of thought and of happy analogies. Even those 



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