INTRODUCTION ix 



observations on plants and animals of the land and sea, 

 little known, familiar, and fossil, on the structure and 

 motion of glaciers, on comparative anatomy and oste- 

 ology, on the relation of man to the lower animals, on 

 ethnology, paleontology, and on other subjects whose 

 names mean nothing to the lay reader. These scientific 

 studies Huxley did not see fit to include in the nine 

 volumes of his collected essays, 1893 and 1894, and only 

 three of these volumes are chiefly scientific, Darwiniana, 

 Man's Place in Nature, and Discourses, Biological and 

 Geological. These three include some of his most 

 brilliant writing and are admirable models of lucid and 

 fascinating exposition of difficult subjects. They ex- 

 hibit too his great gift of showing the significance of 

 science in human life, of seeing science not as a realm 

 apart but as a means of understanding the world in 

 which we live and man's relation to it. And so science 

 taught Huxley not only that the chalky cliffs of Eng- 

 land and the coral reefs of the south seas have been 

 built up during ages from the skeletons of tiny animals, 

 and that all life, both vegetable and animal, is connected 

 by a common physical basis, but that even man, "in 

 substance and in structure, one with the brutes," takes 

 his place in "Nature's great progression." However I 

 have omitted selections from these essays from this little 

 book because they have lost the glamour of novelty and 

 they have not the lively challenge of the essays on sub- 

 jects still in dispute. 



But if we cannot dwell on the results of Huxley's 

 labours in the realm of pure science, we can admire the 

 method by which they were attained, the "only method 

 by which intellectual truth can be reached," as Huxley 

 said, which "simply uses with scrupulous exactness the 

 methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, 

 use carelessly." And we can perceive ample justifica- 



