HUXLEY AND HIS WORK. 1 



By Theodore Gill. 



I. 



The history of scientific progress has been marked by a few periods 

 of intellectual fermentation when great bounds have been taken for- 

 ward and a complete revolution ensued. Very few have been such, 

 but in one the name of Huxley must be ever conspicuous. It was as 

 a lieutenant of the organizer of that revolution that he appeared, but 

 unquestionably without him it would have been long delayed, and it 

 was through his brilliant powers of exposition that the peoples of the 

 English-speaking lineage soon learned to understand, to * oine extent, 

 what evolution was and, learning, to accept it. 



On the 4th of May, 1825, was born the infant Huxley, in due course 

 christened Thomas Henry. " It was," Huxley himself has remarked, 

 "a curious chance that my parents should have fixed for my usual 

 denomination upon the name of that particular apostle with whom I 

 have always felt most sympathy." In his physical and mental pecul- 

 iarities, he was completely the "son of his mother," whose most distin- 

 guishing characteristic was "rapidity of thought;" that characteristic 

 Huxley claimed to have been passed on to him "in full strength," and 

 to have often "stood him in good stead," and to it he was undoubtedly 

 indebted for success in the many intellectual duels he was destined to 

 be engaged in. His "regular school training was of the briefest," and 

 he has expressed a very i)oor opinion of it. His early inclination was 

 to be a mechanical engineer, but he was put to a brother-in-law to 

 study medicine. The only part of his professional course which really 

 interested him was physiology, which he has defined as "the mechan- 

 ical engineering of living machines." The only instruction from which 

 he thought he ever obtained the proper effect of education was that 

 received from Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology 

 at the Charing Cross School of Medicine. At Mr. Jones's suggestion, 

 in 1845, Huxley communicated to the Medical Gazette (p. 1340) his first 



1 A memorial address given on January 14, 1896, before the scientific societies of 

 Washington. Reprinted, with additions, from Science, February 21, 1896. New 

 series, Vol. Ill, No. 60. 



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