CHAPTER XXIV 

 1870 



With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in 

 Huxley's career. From his return to England in 1850 till 

 1854 he had endured four years of hard struggle, of hope 

 deferred ; his reputation as a zoologist had been established 

 before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by his 

 personal energy and power. When at length settled in the 

 professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking 

 himself more than a beginner who had learned to work in 

 one comer of the field of knowledge, still needing deep 

 research into all kindred subjects in order to know the true 

 bearings of his own little portion, that he treated the next 

 six years simply as years of further apprenticeship. Under 

 the suggestive power of the Origin of Species all these scat- 

 tered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the 

 philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his 

 thought with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in 

 defence of the new hypothesis first brought him before the 

 public eye as one who not only had the courage of his con- 

 victions when attacked, but could, and more, would, carry 

 the war efifectively into the enemy's country. And for the 

 next ten years he was commonly identified with the cham- 

 pionship of the most unpopular view of the time ; a fighter, 

 an assailant of long-established fallacies, he was too often 

 considered a mere iconoclast, a subverter of every other 

 well-rooted institution, theological, educational, or moral. 



It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was 

 regarded in the average respectable household in the sixties 

 and early seventies. His name was anathema ; he was a 

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