MODERN EVOLUTION. 



207 



The duties which he then undertook included the 

 deHvery of a course of lectures to working men 

 every alternate year. Some of these — models of 

 their kind — have been reissued in the Collected Es- 

 says. Among the most notable are those on Our 

 Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Or- 

 ganic Nature. At the outset of his public career 

 lecturing was as distasteful to him as in earlier years 

 the trouble of writing was detestable. But mother 

 wit and " needs must " trained him in a short time 

 to win the ear of an audience. One evening in 1852 

 he made his debut at the Royal Institution, and the 

 next day he received a letter charging him with 

 every possible fault that a lecturer could commit — 

 ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in use of hands, 

 mumbling of words, or dropping them down the 

 shirt front. The lesson was timely, and its effect 

 salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and 

 it is worth recording — if but as encouragement to 

 stammerers who have something to say — at what 

 price he " bought this freedom " which held an 

 audience spellbound. How he thus held it in later 

 years they will remember who in the packed theatre 

 of the Royal Institution listened on the evening of 

 Friday, 9th of April, 1880, to his lecture On the Com- 

 ing of Age of the Origin of Species. 



In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps 

 with Tyndall, the result appearing in their joint 

 authorship of a paper on Glacial Phenomena in the 

 Philosophical Transafctions of the following year. 



