5-22 THE ZOOLOGIST, 



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. By his Son, 

 Leonard Huxley. 2 vols. Macmillan & Co., Limited. 



Many, very many, of us who are now growing grey will recall 

 the days of early manhood when the voice of Huxley was regarded 

 as that of a prophet both in science and philosophy. How the 

 great lights of those days have disappeared ! Mill, Carlyle, 

 Darwin, Renan, Tennyson, and Huxley have vanished. We can 

 almost remember the exact circumstances of our lives when each 

 passed away, so profound was the impression created. Younger 

 men see fresh constellations and rising stars, but we find the 

 firmament growing darker as these planets fade ; the days seem 

 growing shorter, and the nights longer ; the ocean to be encroach- 

 ing on the shore, for the beacons are disappearing. 



We possess Huxley's collected writings and lectures ; his cold 

 and cheerless marble effigy adorns the vestibule of our great 

 Natural History Museum ; but of the man himself little was 

 known to most of his readers. He was too generally appreciated 

 as only a great man of science, or a polemical writer of much 

 power and wisdom. These volumes come as a revelation ; we 

 used to read Huxley, and now we know him. 



Huxley was entrusted with a great talent, which he did not 

 hide under a bushel ; but even then his fight for position was a 

 strenuous one, and he probably made a wise choice in adopting 

 for a motto in his early days the well-known words of Danton : 

 " De l'audace et encore de l'audace et toujours de l'audace." 

 This struggle to many would be an abomination, but to Huxley 

 it was a necessity ; he was intellectually a gladiator, and it is 

 probable that the arena developed his immense polemical powers, 

 which rested on a sure and certain knowledge in continuous culti- 

 vation. As we read these pages we are in doubt as to which 

 created or supplemented the other. Great as was the original 

 work he did in zoology, we can never forget the philosophical 



