32 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



combats the general view that "the history of life as a 

 whole, in the past, is analogous to the history of each 

 individual life in the present," and affirms that " the pro- 

 gress of a higher animal in development is not through 

 the forms of the lower, but through forms which are 

 common to both lower and higher. . . ." We find, in fact, 

 that this pre-Darwinian discourse fully appreciates the 

 nature of what is now known as Von Baer's Law, the 

 subject of much misapprehension down to quite recent 

 times. And further one of the difficulties of the evolu- 

 tion theory is here anticipated, i.e., that the great sub- 

 divisions of the animal kingdom are of vast antiquity, and 

 were most or all specialized in times regarding which 

 the geological record as yet is silent, so far as life is 

 concerned. 



During the year 1855 Huxley gave his first course of 

 lectures to working-men at Jermyn Street, thus initiat- 

 ing a direction of his manifold activities which proved 

 both valuable and extremely popular. With rare ex- 

 ceptions, working men only were admitted to these 

 courses, and curious subterfuges were sometimes resorted 

 to in order to secure the much-coveted places in the 

 auditorium. The writer knows of one such case, where 

 a clerk succeeded in gaining admission by representing 

 himself as a " driver," suppressing a part of his full 

 description as a " quill-driver.'' Before lecturing to this 

 kind of audience Huxley wrote to his friend Dyster : — 

 " I am sick of the dilettante middle-class, and mean to 

 try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who 

 live among facts." And in a subsequent letter, after 

 paying a tribute to the earnestness and attention of the 

 audience, he goes on to say :— " I believe in the fustian, 

 and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze 

 and Saxony. . . ." Certain it is that Huxley exerted 



