264 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



ill heath, to resign all his public appointments ; though so recently 

 as May, 1893, he delivered the second "Romanes Lecture" at 

 Oxford, and from time to time contrived to keep in touch with 

 public life by the occasional utterance of an after-dinner speech, 

 or the publication of a magazine article on some topic of the day. 

 In one of the healthiest parts of the south of England he at length 

 sought that quietude and repose which most men look for, or at 

 least hope for, towards the close of life, and in the use of books, 

 the cultivation of flowers, and the society of friends, he found a 

 daily source of enjoyment. His busy mind, however, would not 

 allow him to remain long idle, as he would term it, and we believe 

 that at the time of his death he had in preparation an essay on 

 " Saxifrages," to which plants he had for some time previously 

 been paying close attention. For, although not a professed 

 botanist, Prof. Huxley upon occasion wrote ably upon botanical 

 subjects ; witness his paper upon " Gentians," published in the 

 * Journal of the Linnean Society' (vol. xxiv. 1887, pp. 101-124), 

 and his Lecture at the Royal Institution upon the Border-land 

 between Animals and Plants. Few men have worked harder to 

 gain a reputation in the scientific world ; few have more ably 

 earned it. 



The son of a schoolmaster at Ealing, where he was born in 

 May, 1825, he had but a brief school career, and had early to 

 decide upon a profession. His inclination, he used to say, was 

 to become a mechanical engineer, but it was thought better for 

 him to apply himself to medicine. Having gone through a course 

 of study at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, he 

 graduated M.B. at the University of London in 1845, and 

 qualified himself, in 1846, to act as a surgeon in the navy by 

 becoming M.R.C.S. He used to declare in after years that 

 the only part of his professional course that really interested 

 him was the physiology — " the mechanical engineering of the 

 living machines/' It was at Haslar, when acting as assistant- 

 surgeon, that Huxley came under the influence of Sir John 

 Richardson, the famous Arctic traveller and naturalist, and to 

 this association may perhaps be attributed his subsequent aban- 

 donment of physic for physiology. His first appointment as 

 assistant-surgeon on board ship was to the * Rattlesnake,' which 

 was ordered by the Admiralty to make a survey of the Barrier 

 Reef on the eastern coast of Anstralia, and also to explore the 



