HUXLEY AND HIS WORK. 761 



after a long illness (" complication following influenza'' ! ) died there on 

 the 29th of June, 1895. 



Such were the principal episodes in the life of Huxley. Many more 

 details may be found in the numerous periodicals of the day, and in 

 some of them are depicted various phases of his character and labors. 

 The short time that is at our disposal to-night may be most profitably 

 and entertainingly utilized in reviewing his feats as a warrior of science 

 and estimating the measure of influence he exercised in diverting human 

 thought from the ruts in which it had moved for centuries and direct- 

 ing it into a highway where increasing light from different sides could 

 guide the wayfarer. Although this period of warfare was at its height 

 not further back than the early afternoon of the present century, and 

 some of us here assembled joined in the fray, to the younger naturalists 

 it is an unknown past except through history, and to some of us who 

 were of it, it is so strange as to recur to us rather as a dream than as 

 a realized passage in actual life. 



II. 



Doubtless man, almost from the moment of his acquisition of those 

 characters which distinguish him as representative of the genus Homo, 

 had wondered and speculated as to how he came into being and how the 

 animals assembled round him had sprung into existence. Those early 

 concepts must have been strange, indeed, but were doubtless trans- 

 mitted from mother to child, only with some eccentricities lopped off 

 with advancing intelligence. Gradually, among peoples of the Aryan 

 stock at least, they crystallized into a doctrine that in the beginning 

 there was chaos, that the three elements of air, water, and earth were 

 differentiated, and that animals were successively created to occupy the 

 spaces. Such were the views of the old oriental cosmologists and 

 such of the later Eomans as epitomized in Ovid's verse. These ideas 

 were long regnant and naturalists embodied some in their schemes, 

 most accepting the idea that animals may have been created in pairs, 

 but a few (such as Agassiz) urging that they must have been created in 

 communities approximating to those still found. There were very few 

 to dissent from these views of specific creation, and those few had little 

 influence on the popular beliefs. But as the present century advanced, 

 curious men delved into all the mysteries of nature; the sciences of 

 morphology, physiology, histology, embryology, geology, and zoogeogra- 

 phy came into being, and facts were marshaled from every side that mil- 

 itated against the old conceptions. Even when these sciences were 

 inchoate, or new born, sagacious men had perceived the drift of the facts 

 and anticipated induction by the formulation of hypotheses of evolution, 

 but the hypotheses were too crude to insure acceptance. Meanwhile, 

 however, the facts accumulated, and in 1859 a factor determining the 



1 Lancet, July 6, pp. 64, 65. 



