PR 6013 H98S64 THE LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Prof. Carl S. Dowries \r- I SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY EDITED BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH EDGAR ALLAN FOE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY THE QUINN 4 800EN CO. PRESS RAMWAY, N. J. fR CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE I. Huxley's Life and Work vii II. The Selections xix DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY xxv SELECTIONS Autobiography ; 3 Letters 16 On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge 28 A Liberal Education: and where to find it . . . -47 On a Piece of Chalk 74 y Science and Art in Relation to Education .... 103 NOTES AND COMMENT 127 QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR STUDY 146 Portrait of Huxley Frontispiece 1734619 IN a letter written to his sister in 1850 Huxley said : " I don't know and I don't care whether I shall ever be what is called a great man. I shall leave my mark somewhere, and it shall be clear and distinct T. H. H. his mark. and free from the abominable blur of cant, humbug, and self-seeking which surrounds everything in this present world that is to say, supposing that I am not already un- consciously tainted myself, a result of which I have a mor- bid dread." We shall not debate the question whether Huxley was " what is called a great man," but no one fa- miliar with his life and work can doubt for a moment that he has left his mark or that it is " clear and distinct." He had the good fortune to find his work early a rare piece of good fortune and never to doubt that he had found it. For just fifty years, from 1845 to 1895, he wrought hap- pily and usefully. When he died he had the satisfaction of knowing that his fame was secure and that he had added to the knowledge and welfare of his fellow-men. Thomas Henry Huxley was born of good but poor parents at Ealing, a village not far from London, on May 4, 1825. He told Charles Kingsley that he was "kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none." He tells us in his Autobiography of vii viii Introduction the wretched little school that he attended, and in after years used to say that " he had two years of a Pandemo- nium of a school (between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till he reached manhood." He was always fond of reading and used to browse at random in his father's library. " When a boy of twelve," his son and biographer writes, " he used to light his candle before dawn, pin a blanket around his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read Hutton's Geology." His tastes were scientific but he did not confine his reading to science. He was still a child when he read Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy of the Unconditioned, but his comment on it is not that of a child: "It stamped on my mind the strong conviction that on even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for an- swers." But Carlyle had the most lasting influence upon him during these formative years. It was interest in Carlyle that led him to study German, just as at the age of fifty- three he learned Greek so that he might read Aristotle in the original. During these years he also taught himself French and Italian. Of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus he wrote : " It led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology." Carlyle taught him also a hatred of shams and a love of uncompromising truthfulness that remained a passion with him as long as he lived. " If wife and child," he said, " and name and fame were all lost to me, one after an- other, still I would not lie. . . . The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, ' I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act." Huxley's Life and Work ix After serving as assistant under one or two physicians he received an appointment in 1842 to one of the free scholarships at the Charing Cross Hospital in London. He was now seventeen years old and his application for ad- mission to Charing Cross certified that " He has a fair knowledge of Latin, reads French with facility, and knows something of German. He has also made consider- able progress in mathematics, having, as far as he has ad- vanced, a thorough not a superficial knowledge of the subject." In 1845 he won his M.B. (Bachelor of Medi- cine) at the University of London and also a gold medal for proficiency in anatomy and physiology. He tells us also that in this year he published his first scientific paper, "a very little one," in the Medical Gazette', but he does not tell us that this paper announced a permanent contribu- tion to anatomy. The youthful investigator had found a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair and this membrane is now known as " Huxley's layer." In December of 1846 Huxley left England as assistant surgeon on board her Majesty's ship, the Rattlesnake. The cruise lasted four years, three being spent in Aus- tralian waters. It was on a voyage of this sort that Charles Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker had laid the foundations of their scientific careers. Indeed we can hardly imagine a better scientific training than such a voyage afforded. The young scientist had to depend largely on his own resources. He had to collect and dis- sect without the aid of many books. He was confronted daily by forms of marine life either unknown or at least unclassified. But it was just the discipline that Huxley needed and wanted. When he returned in 1850, Edward Forbes, the best English authority on star-fishes, examined his collection and wrote to him, saying: "I can say with- out exaggeration that more important or more complete x Introduction zoological researches have never been conducted during any voyage of discovery in the southern hemisphere. The course you have taken of directing your attention mainly to impreservable creatures, and to those orders of the animal kingdom respecting which we have least informa- tion, and the care and skill with which you have conducted elaborate dissections and microscopic examinations of the curious creatures you were so fortunate as to meet with, necessarily gives a peculiar and unique character to your researches, since thereby they fill up gaps in our knowledge of the animal kingdom. This is more important, since such researches have been almost always neglected during voyages of discovery." But Huxley's cruise in Australian waters had another result. Three weeks after his return to England, he wrote to his sister, Mrs. J. G. Scott, who was then living in Nashville, Tennessee: " I have a woman's element in me. I hate the incessant struggle and toil to cut one an- other's throat among us men, and I long to be able to meet with some one in whom I can place implicit confidence, whose judgment I can respect, and yet who will not laugh at my most foolish weaknesses, and in whose love I can forget all care. All these conditions I have fulfilled in Nettie. With a strong natural intelligence, and knowl- edge enough to understand and sympathize with my aims, with the firmness of a man when necessary, she combines the gentleness of a very woman and the honest simplicity of a child, and then she loves me well, as well as I love her, and you know I love but few in the real meaning of the word, perhaps, but two she and you . . . The worst of it is I have no ambition, except as means to an end, and that end is the possession of a sufficient income to marry upon. I assure you I would not give two straws for all the honors and titles in the world. A worker I Huxley's Life and Work xi must always be it is my nature but if I had 400 a year I would never let my name appear to anything I did or shall ever do. It would be glorious to be a voice work- ing in secret and free from all those personal motives that have actuated the best." The woman thus charmingly referred to was Miss Henrietta Anne Heathorn, whom he had met in Australia in 1848. But not till 1855 could he write: "I terminate my Baccalaureate and take my degree of M.A. trimony (isn't that atrocious?) on Saturday, July 21." He had served as long for her as Jacob thought to serve for Rachel, but during their forty years of married life he found in her his best comforter and wisest counselor. What he said of her in 1848 he could say with added assurance in 1895: "I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition, or so pure and womanly a mind." Twelve years after his marriage he was visited by a German, Dr. Dohrn, who wrote: " I have been reading several chapters of Mill's Utili- tarianism and have found the word ' happiness ' occurring very often. If / had to give anybody a definition of this much debated word, I should only say, 'Go and see the Huxley family.' " His life was very busy now, but he found time in the summer of 1876 to visit America and to deliver the in- augural address at the opening of the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity in Baltimore. He received an enthusiastic wel- come, and the letters that he sent from America are among the most interesting that he ever wrote. The little tug-boats in the harbor of New York seemed espe- cially to interest him. " If I were not a man," he said, " I think I should like to be a tug." On the material greatness of America he remarked : " I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or xii Introduction your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur; territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity and the terror of overhang- ing fate, is, What are you going to do with all these things? The one condition of success, your sole safe- guard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be and may be the fortresses of the higher life of the nation." Huxley was never very strong. In 1888 he wrote to a friend : " Dame Nature has given me a broad hint that I have had my innings, and, for the rest of my time, must be content to look on at the players." The essays alone, however, that he wrote after 1888 would have given him a place among the intellectual leaders of the century. Three days before his death he writes as jauntily as ever: " At present I don't feel at all like ' sending in my checks,' and without being over sanguine I rather incline to think that my native toughness will get the best of it." The end came quietly on June 29, 1895. At his request these lines, written by Mrs. Huxley, were inscribed upon his tombstone: "Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; For still He giveth His beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wills, so best." Of Huxley's busy career the Autobiography gives us only glimpses here and there. We learn from it, however, that his chief interests lay in " the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions " of nature, and in promot- ing " the application of scientific methods of investigation Huxley's Life and Work xiii to all the problems of Kfe." In other words, Huxley spent his life in forwarding science and education. He was not only a naturalist but a sociologist. Was he greater, now, in discovery or in application? He was great in both but greater, we think, in the latter. Let us see. As a scientific discoverer, Huxley can never rank with Newton or Darwin. But if these are immortals of the first rank, Huxley is as certainly an immortal of the second rank. It is interesting to see how eager Darwin was to know how The Origin of Species, Darwin's greatest work, would impress Huxley. Darwin called Huxley his " general agent," and Huxley called himself " Darwin's bulldog." The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and Darwin wrote: " If I can convert Huxley I shall be con- tent." With one or two reservations, Huxley was con- verted and championed the book the rest of his life. But this association with Darwin and with Darwin's work has caused most readers to overlook Huxley's own contribu- tions to science. These may be summarized in untechnical language under five heads. We have already seen that at the age of twenty Huxley discovered an unknown layer in the human hair now known by his name. More important, however, than "Huxley's layer" was his paper published in 1849 on The Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of the Medusa. The medusae are jelly-fishes and their classifica- tion had been in a state of chaos till Huxley succeeded in finding " unity of plan " not only in them but in the entire family to which they belong. He discovered that all medusae are built up of two cell-layers, two " foundation- membranes," inclosing a stomach cavity. He did not know then how his discovery would help to prepare the way for Darwin's work. Scientists, however, knew al- xiv Introduction ready that all backboned animals passed through certain regular and definite stages in their progress from the embryo to the adult state, but Huxley showed that all backboned animals passed through the medusa:; stage, that is, they also exhibited two corresponding " foundation- membranes." He had thus laid a foundation on which other scientists were soon to build. Another original view appeared in The Cell Theory (1853). Before this time scientists had believed, as many still believe, the cell to be the ultimate life-unit. In other words, the cell was life reduced to its lowest terms. It was the smallest particle of life just as the atom is con- sidered the smallest particle of matter. Huxley contended that the real life-element was not the cell but protoplasm, that protoplasm was the raw stuff that built up the cell just as the cell built up the body. He compared proto- plasm to the sea, cells to the numberless shells and weeds that the sea tosses up. While this theory has not been universally accepted it has not been conclusively over- thrown. But perhaps Huxley's best claim to popular recognition as a scientist is that he discovered, or at least was the first to announce, the pedigree of the horse. In 1870 he said that if there were strong reasons to believe that our mod- ern one-toed horse had a remote ancestor with three toes, there were still stronger reasons to believe that he had a still more remote ancestor with five toes. When Hux- ley visited America in 1876, Professor O. C. Marsh of Yale University showed him the fossil of a horse with four complete toes on the front leg and three on the hind leg. Huxley now re-affirmed his theory of a five-toed horse, " in which, if the doctrine of evolution is well- founded, the whole series must have taken its origin." Two months later Professor Marsh actually discovered the Huxley's Life and Work xv fossil of an American horse with five toes. The honor of the find belongs, therefore, by discovery to Professor Marsh, and only by prophecy to Huxley. One other contribution to anatomy may be said to close Huxley's achievements as a discoverer. It was a generally accepted belief that the skull was merely the expanded backbone. A German naturalist, named Oken, while walking in the Harz Mountains, had picked up the dried skull of a sheep, and it suddenly occurred to him that this skull was nothing but a series of expanded vertebrae molded together. Oken's view was accepted in England till Huxley overthrew it. He examined the skulls of fishes, beasts, and men, and found that Oken's theory was not borne out by the facts. " It may be true," he said, " that there is a primitive identity of structure be- tween the spinal or vertebral column and the skull, but it is no more true that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column than it would be to affirm that the vertebral column is a modified skull." Let us turn now to Huxley's services in the cause of education. If Darwin outranks him as a scientist, he outranks Darwin just as incontestably as an educator. His interests were more varied than Darwin's, his per- ceptions quicker, his personality more vigorous, his human sympathies broader, and his command of the resources of the English language far superior. If Huxley had done nothing more than contribute to modern thought the definition of a liberal education found on pages 54 and 55 of this book, he would be remembered at least to the ex- tent of that stimulating paragraph. But he did far more. He talked and wrote and worked unceasingly to make his educational ideals prevail. These ideals are scattered through his essays and lectures and letters, but the funda- mentals may be easily summarized. xvi Introduction The function of education as a national concern should be, he contended, to provide " a ladder reaching from the gutter to the university, along which every child in the three kingdoms should have the chance of climbing as far as he was fit to go." All children, but especially town- bred children, should be taught the simpler forms of gymnastics. After reading, writing, and arithmetic, the emphasis should be put upon one or more of the natural sciences, because in these the faculties of observation and inquiry are disciplined. The value of drawing, he thought, could not be exaggerated, " because it gives the means of training the young in attention and accuracy, the two things in which all mankind are more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever." Women are not excluded from his scheme of education but expressly included. "The mind of the average girl," he wrote, " is less different from that of the average boy, than"*the mind of one boy is from that of another; so that whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys, justifies its application to girls as well. So far from im- posing artificial restriction upon the acquirement of knowl- edge by women, throw every facility in their way. . . . They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the golden hair will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within. . . . Let them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have a fair field, but let them understand as the necessary correlative, that they are to have no favor. . . . And the result? Women will find their place and it will neither be that in which they have been held, nor that to which some of them aspire." Literature should have an important place because " an exclusively-scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. For Huxley's Life and Work xvii literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure, and there is scope enough for the purposes of liberal educa- tion in the study of the rich treasures of our own lan- guage alone. ... I have said before, and I repeat it here, that if a man cannot get literary culture of the high- est kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, he cannot get it out of anything, and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to the careful study of models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more important, and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art." Moral training should not be neglected. Since each child is " a member of a social and political organization of great complexity, and has, in future, to fit himself into that organization, or be crushed by it, it is needful not only that boys and girls should be made acquainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but that their affections should be trained so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which tends to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite course of action which is fraught with evil." As his own children were taught the Bible, he advocated its use in all elementary schools. He saw no way in which " the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion, without the use of the Bible." Then follows this eloquent passage: " Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in Eng- lish history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from John-o'- xviii Introduction Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the exist- ence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the old- est nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work?" Huxley's success as an educational leader was due not to natural gifts as a speaker or writer but to depth of con- viction, to steady growth, and to persistent self-improve- ment. " I have a great love and respect for my native tongue," he wrote in 1891, "and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious as I grow older." His creed was: "Say that which has to be said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each word." His best writing is in his letters, where his humor, his abounding vigor, his nimble fancy, his quick feeling for analogy, his wide command of illustration, his passion for directness find their amplest exhibition. He brought into his writings the same " unity of plan " which he found " in the thousands and thousands of diverse living con- structions " that surrounded him. The force and vivid- ness of his style find their explanation in the fact that he The Selections xix was always an investigator and thus always a learner. No man could vivify and humanize the claims of science as Huxley has done unless he was himself invigorated by a sense of daily growth and achievement. The lesson of his style at last is not, Study science that you may learn to write clearly, but, Think for yourself that your message may come with force, directness, and conviction. II THE SELECTIONS THE selections that follow have been chosen with three ends in view : ( I ) To throw light on the char- acter and services of Huxley; (2) to stimulate an inter- est in the principles and problems of modern science; and (3) to furnish examples of clear, flexible, forceful prose. It will be seen that the Autobiography is an admirable example of narration, that the Letters furnish still more interesting examples of both narration and description, and that the Essays confine themselves almost wholly to exposition and argumentation. The selections exemplify, therefore, the four literary types or kinds of discourse. What follows is intended to serve as an introduction not only to the selections themselves but also to the Notes and Comment and to the Questions and Topics for Study. I. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. On March 2, 1889, Huxley wrote to his wife: "A man who is bringing out a series of portraits of celebrities, with a sketch of their career attached, has bothered me out of my life for something to go with my portrait, and to escape the abominable bad taste of some of the notices, I have done that. I shall show it to you before it goes back to Engel in proof." xx Introduction To Engel he wrote: "You are really the most perti- naciously persuasive of men. When you first wrote to me, I said I would have nothing whatever to do with any- thing you might please to say about me, that I had a profound objection to write about myself, and that I could not see what business the public had with my private life. I think I even expressed to you my complete sym- pathy with Dr. Johnson's desire to take Boswell's life when he heard of the latter's occupation with his biography. " Undeterred by all this, you put before me the alterna- tive of issuing something that may be all wrong, unless I furnish you with something authoritative; I do not say all right, because autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be. So I yield, and send you what follows, in the hope that those who find it to be mere egotistical gossip will blame you and not me." The Autobiography was written, then, in 1889, six years before Huxley's death. It was published in Method and Results (1893), which is volume one of Huxley's Collected Essays. Huxley was often urged to write a longer sketch of his life, but seemed to think it not worth the time. His best autobiography is to be found in the letters published in The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son, Leonard Huxley (American edition, 2 volumes, New York, 1901). 2. LETTERS. These letters, dating from 1852 to 1892, are really a continuation of the Autobiography, no form of literature being as truly autobiographic as the letter. They present Huxley the man, Huxley the scientist, Huxley the public-spirited citizen. The frank expression of his hopes and ideals, the impressions made upon him by the funerals of the Duke of Wellington and Tenny- son, his immediate recognition of the significance of Darwin's great work, his interesting description of the The Selections xxi day spent on Mount Vesuvius, his magnanimous estimate of Pasteur's services, the sturdy common sense of his ad- vice to a young man all these supplement the Auto- biography at vital points. The style of these letters is notable, too, for its freedom and flexibility, and for a certain rapidity of thought which Huxley said he owed to his mother. 3. ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE. This lay sermon was delivered in St. Mar- tin's Hall, London, January 7, 1866. It was published in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (1870), and republished in the first volume of Collected Essays. Hux- ley had spoken in St. Martin's Hall twelve years before on The Educational Value of the Natural History Sci- ences. The earlier address marked the beginning of Huxley's persistent endeavor to secure for science its rightful place in the educational system of England. The two addresses are strikingly alike. Of the first (now published in the third volume of Collected Essays) Huxley said : " It contains some crudities, which I repudiated when the lecture was first reprinted, more than twenty years ago ; but it will be seen that much of what I have had to say, later on in life, is merely a development of the propositions enunciated in this early and sadly imperfect piece of work." One passage, at least, in the earlier essay deserves reproduction : " So far as I can arrive at any clear comprehension of the matter, science is not, as many would seem to suppose, a modification of the black art, suited to the tastes of the nineteenth century, and flourishing mainly in consequence of the decay of the Inquisition. Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit." The address here reproduced might be called The xxii Introduction Cultural vs. the Utilitarian Value of Science. It was not delivered to working men, and is hardly so popular in style or so practical in purpose as are the two follow- ing addresses. Its theme is the desirableness, not any par- ticular method, of improving natural knowledge. The two leading thoughts that science not only provides ma- terial comforts but (i) implants great ideas and (2) inculcates a higher type of ethics are presented with great clearness. The second point, however, can hardly be considered as proved. The introduction to the essay proper, though a trifle long, is a model of its kind. 4. A LIBERAL EDUCATION: AND WHERE TO FIND IT. This was the opening address that Huxley delivered as Principal of the South London Working Men's College on January 4, 1868. It was published in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews ( 1870) and republished in the third volume of Collected Essays. This address differs radically in method from the preceding. It is a presentation by means of a carefully formulated definition. If the defini- tion of the liberally educated man be conceded, where can such an education be found? What, then, is needed? This lecture and the following, says Mr. Leonard Huxley, "seem to me to mark the maturing of his style into that mastery of clear expression for which he delib- erately labored, the saying exactly what he meant, neither too much nor too little. ... Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape either way, there is no hope for you. This was the secret of his lucidity." This may be the secret of Huxley's lucidity, but lucidity alone is not the distinguishing characteristic of Huxley's style. His style is more than lucid. Its The Selections xxiii lucidity is vitalized by conviction and enthusiasm. These are personal or rather, emotional traits, while lucidity is purely intellectual. Euclid and Blackstone are lucid; Macaulay and Huxley are vivid. Huxley began his lectures to working men in 1855. " I am sick of the dilettante class," he wrote, " and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts." Only working men were admitted, though a clerk once secured admission by calling himself a " driver." He was in fact a " quill-driver." The at- tendance and attention were equally gratifying, and Hux- ley exerted himself to the utmost to make these lectures a power for right thinking and right living. They represent him at his best in the spoken presentation of scientific truth. 5. ON A PIECE OF CHALK. This lecture was de- livered to the working men of Norwich during the meet- ing of the British Association in 1 868. It was published in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (1870), and republished in the eighth volume of Collected Essays. An interesting reference to Mrs. Huxley's good judgment is made by Huxley in connection with the proof-sheets of this lecture. He wrote to her from Norwich, August 23, 1866: "I met Grove who edits Macmillan, at the soiree. He pulled the proof of my lecture out of his pocket and said : ' Look here, there is one paragraph in your lecture I can make neither top nor tail of. I can't understand what it means.' I looked to where his finger pointed, and behold it was the paragraph you objected to when I read you the lecture on the seashore ! I told him, and said I should confess, however set up it might make you." " The address is noteworthy," says Mr. J. R. Ains- worth Davis, " in a variety of ways. For one thing it marks the increasing interest which men of science were xxiv Introduction beginning to take in deep-sea life, and which culminated in the equipment and despatch of the Challenger expedi- tion towards the end of 1872." Interest in deep-sea problems, it may be said, had been greatly stimulated by the publication in 1855 of Matthew Fontaine Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea. This book was re- printed in England, where it passed through more than twenty editions. Huxley's address is noteworthy also as a perfect example of how a thinker can take a seemingly trivial subject and make it " a window into the infinite." Huxley's Piece of Chalk belongs with Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall. 6. ON SCIENCE AND ART IN RELATION TO EDUCA- TION. This lecture was delivered at a meeting of the Liverpool Institution in 1882 and published in the third volume of Collected Essays. It forms a fitting conclusion to our selections because Huxley here summarizes his views about education, defends his position against the charge of one-sidedness, re-affirms what he has said about science, and then talks interestingly and helpfully about literature in general, about grammar, drawing, English literature in particular, English composition, the value of translations in fact, " all the essentials of education for an English child." In simplicity of style, in maturity of thought, in range and variety of topics discussed, in autobiographic signifi- cance, in all the elements of clear and forceful exposition, this lecture outranks (in the editor's opinion) all that have preceded it. It is, therefore, more than a conclusion to our selections: it is, in its way, a summary and a culmination. DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY THE best account of Huxley's life and varied activities is The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son, Leonard Huxley, in two volumes (London, 1900). The American edition is published by D. Apple- ton and Company, New York. This is one of the most interesting and stimulating of modern biographies. The whole modern scientific movement is reflected in it. A good book, made of gleanings from The Life and Letters, is Thomas Henry Huxley, by Edward Clodd, to whom some of the Huxley letters were written. This /olume is number eight in the Modern English Writers Series (Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1902). Clodd discusses Huxley in successive chapters as Man (the best chapter), Discoverer, Interpreter, Controversialist, and Constructor, there being no chapter on Huxley the Writer. Chalmers Mitchell's Thomas Henry Huxley: A Sketch of His Life and Work, and George Smalley's Mr. Huxley (published in Scribner's Magazine, October, 1895) are interesting presentations from different points of view, but they are less significant since the appearance of The Life and Letters. Fiske's Reminiscences of Hux- ley (in The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1901) is an eminently readable sketch of Huxley the man. The best sketch of Huxley, as a scientist, is Thomas H. Huxley, by J. R. Ainsworth Davis (London and New York, 1907). A complete list of obituary notices and personal reminiscences will be found in Poole's Index to Periodical XXV xxvi Descriptive Bibliography Literature, Third Supplement, 1892-1896, and Fourth Supplement, 1897-1902. Huxley's writings (essays, books, and scientific memoirs) form Appendix III in The Life and Letters and cover nineteen pages. Only the more significant books need be mentioned here. The dates are those of first editions: 1863. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. The main contention of the book is thus summarized on page 67: "Without question, the mode of origin and the early stages of the development of man are iden- tical with those of the animals immediately below him in the scale: without a doubt, in these respects, he is far nearer the Apes than the Apes are to the Dog." 1866. Lessons in Elementary Physiology. This has proved the most popular of Huxley's books. Before his death it had passed into its fourth edition and been reprinted twenty-eight times. 1870. Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews. The fifteen chapters cover the years from 1854 to 1870. The volume includes the first three addresses reprinted in this book. 1877. American Addresses. These addresses are good illustrations of how scientific accuracy may be not only joined with but vitalized by imagination. They discuss university education, creation, evolution, and methods of biological study. The lecture On the Study of Biology, though included in American Addresses, was not delivered until after Huxley's return to England. 1878. Hume. Though this book appeared in the English Men of Letters Series, the emphasis is naturally upon Hume the philosopher. " It is assuredly one of Hume's greatest merits," says Huxley on page 63, " that he clearly recognized the fact that philosophy is based upon psychology ; and that the inquiry into the con- tents and the operations of the mind must be con- ducted upon the same principles as a physical investiga- Descriptive Bibliography xxvii tion, if what he calls the ' moral philosopher ' would attain results of as firm and definite a character as those which reward the ' natural philosopher.' " 1893. Evolution and Ethics. Huxley's views on this subject are tersely stated in a letter of March 23, 1894: "There are two very dif- ferent questions which people fail to discriminate. One is whether evolution accounts for morality, the other whether the principle of evolution in general can be adopted as an ethical principle. The first, of course, I advocate, and have constantly insisted upon. The second I deny, and reject all so-called evolutional ethics based upon it." 1893-1894. Collected Essays. These nine volumes contain all of Huxley's writings that he cared to preserve, except the more technical papers. 1898-1903. The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley. These, the purely scientific works of Huxley, were edited in five volumes by Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester. SELECTIONS FROM HUXLEY AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1889) And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of greater importance, 5 seem to be put upon me to do. Bishop Butler to the Duchess of Somerset. THE "many things" to which the Duchess's corre- spondent here refers are the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great 10 apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might 15 write books and yet be permitted to keep his private exist- ence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay concealed in the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of time. 20 At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism " Bene qu'i latuit, bene vixit" is not always able to act up to it. An importunate person informs him that his portrait is about to be published and will be accompanied by a biography which the importunate person proposes to 25 write. The sufferer knows what that means; either he 4 Selections from Huxley undertakes to revise the "biography" or he does not. In the former case, he makes himself responsible ; in the latter, he allows the publication of a mass of more or less ful- some inaccuracies for which he will be held responsible 5 by those who are familiar with the prevalent art of self- advertisement. On the whole, it may be better to get over the " burlesque of being employed in this manner " and do the thing himself. It was by reflections of this kind that, some years ago, I 10 was led to write and permit the publication of the sub- joined sketch. I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on the 4th of May, 1825, at Ealing, which was, at that time, as quiet a little country village as could be found within 15 half-a-dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Now it is a suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants. My father was one of the masters in a large semi-public school which at one time had a high reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrival in this world, 20 but, in my childhood, I remember having a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the un- usual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, prob- 25 ably, a neighboring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on 30 my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mel- lifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the high- est places in church and state. But the opportunity was Autobiography 5 lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain lan- guage, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement. ^ Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know; 5 but it is a curious chance that my parents should have fixed for my usual denomination upon the name of that par- ticular Apostle with whom I have always felt most sym- pathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so completely even down to peculiar movements of the 10 hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of 15 tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy. My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With 20 no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say: 25 " I cannot help it, things flash across me." That pecu- liarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead ; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing 30 I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit. I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. In later years my mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, 6 Selections from Huxley would sometimes say, " Ah ! you were such a pretty boy ! " whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of certain curls of 5 which I was vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country folk, because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember 10 turning my pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning when the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest indication I can call to mind 15 of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Her- bert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most part remained in a latent state. My regular school training was of the briefest, per- haps fortunately, for though my way of life has made me 20 acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the 25 people who were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby- farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle for existence among ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill practices current among us. Almost the only 30 cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild- cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of Autobiography 7 weight, and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and- ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that I the victor had a black eye, while he the vanquished had none, so 5 that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam an- 10 tagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position, but at that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not only been " sent out," but had under- 15 gone more than one colonial conviction. As I grew older, my great desire was to be a me- chanical engineer, but the fates were against this and, while very young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the In- 20 stitute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus inftdelium. I am now occasionally horrified to think how very little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only 25 part of my professional course which really and deeply in- terested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engi- neering of living machines; and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I 30 never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thou- 8 Selections from Huxley sands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The ex- traordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the in- tricacies of living structure nearly proved fatal to me at 5 the outset. I was a mere boy I think between thirteen and fourteen years of age when I was taken by some older student friends of mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which 10 attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my curi- osity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison super- vened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember 15 sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring morning after my 20 arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odor of wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farm-yard in the early morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon re- 25 covered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle. Looking back on my " Lehrjahre," I am sorry to 30 say that I do not think that any account of my doings as a student would tend to edification. In fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating my example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did not which was a very frequent case Autobiography 9 I was extremely idle (unless making caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch of industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions. I read everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as 5 speedily. No doubt it was very largely my own fault, but the only instruction from which I ever obtained the proper effect of education was that which I received from Mr. Wharton Jones, wfio was the lecturer on physiology at the Charing Cross School of Medicine. The extent and pre- 10 cision of his knowledge impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of lecturing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since. I worked hard to obtain his approbation, and he was extremely kind 15 and helpful to the youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to do. It was he who suggested the publication of my first scientific paper a very little one in the Medical Gazette of 1845, and most kindly corrected the literary faults which 20 abounded in it, short as it was ; for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I detested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains over it. It was in the early spring of 1846, that, having fin- ished my obligatory medical studies and passed the first 25 M.D. examination at the London University, though I was still too young to qualify at the College of Sur- geons, I was talking to a fellow-student (the present eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), and wondering what I should do to meet the imperative necessity for 30 earning my own bread, when my friend suggested that I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that time Director- General for the Medical Service of the Navy, for an appointment. I thought this rather a strong thing to do, io Selections from Huxley as Sir William was personally unknown to me, but my cheery friend would not listen to my scruples, so I went to my lodgings and wrote the best letter I could devise. A few days afterwards I received the usual official cir- 5 cular acknowledgment, but at the bottom there was written an instruction to call at Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked like business, so at the ap- pointed time I called and sent in my card, while I waited in Sir William's ante-room! 1 * He was a tall, io shrewd-looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch ac- cent and I think I see him now as he entered with my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to return it, with the frugal reminder that I should probably find it useful on some other occasion. The second was to ask 15 whether I was an Irishman. I suppose the air of modesty about my appeal must have struck him. I satisfied the Director-General that I was English to the backbone, and he made some inquiries as to my student career, finally desiring me to hold myself ready for examination. Having 20 passed this, I was in her Majesty's service, and entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months after I made my application. My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable per- 25 son, the late Sir John Richardson, an excellent naturalist, and far-famed as an indomitable Arctic traveler. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the circle of his family and intimates; and, having a full share of youthful vanity, I was extremely disgusted to find that " Old John," as we 30 irreverent youngsters called him, took not the slightest notice of my worshipful self either the first time I at- tended him, as it was my duty to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I am afraid to think of the lengths to which my tongue may have run on the subject of the churlish- Autobiography n ness of the chief, who was, in truth, one of the kindest- hearted and most considerate of men. But one day, as I was crossing the hospital square, Sir John stopped me, and heaped coals of fire on my head by telling me that he had tried to get me one of the resident appointments, much 5 coveted by the assistant surgeons, but that the Admiralty had put in another man. " However," said he, " I mean to keep you here till I can get you something you will like," and turned upon his heel without waiting for the thanks I stammered out. That explained how it was I had 10 not been packed off to the west coast of Africa like some of my juniors, and why, eventually, I remained alto- gether seven months at Haslar. After a long interval, during which " Old John " ig- nored my existence almost as completely as before, he 15 stopped me again as we met in a casual way, and describ- ing the service on which the Rattlesnake was likely to be employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who Was to command the ship, had asked him to recommend an as- sistant surgeon who knew something of science; would I 20 like that? Of course I jumped at the offer. " Very well, I give you leave ; go to London at once and see Captain Stanley." I went, saw my future commander, who was very civil to me, and promised to ask that I should be appointed to his ship, as in due time I was. It is a singu- 25 lar thing that, during the few months of my stay at Has- lar, I had among my messmates two future Directors- General of the Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alex- ander Armstrong and Sir John Watt-Reid), with the present President of the College of Physicians and my 30 kindest of doctors, Sir Andrew Clark. Life on board her Majesty's ship in those days was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months 12 Selections from Huxley without receiving letters or seeing any civilized people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire- 5 arms as we did on the south coast of New Guinea and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilized people. But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely valuable. It 10 was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare neces- saries; to find out how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy and cocoa and 15 weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast ; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be and generally are, but, naturally, 20 they neither knew nor cared anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies, christened " Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a -volume of the Suites a Buffon, which stood on my shelf in the chart- 25 room. During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication after communication to the " Linnean Society," with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last of 30 hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and forwarded it to the Royal Society. This was my dove, if I had only known it. But owing to the movements of the ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return to England Autobiography 13 in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me. When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy and encour- agement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was 5 not the least valuable part of my education. Three years after my return were occupied by a bat- tle between my scientific friends on the one hand and the Admiralty on the other, as to whether the latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a pledge they had 10 given to encourage officers who had done scientific work by contributing to the expense of publishing mine. At last the Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as Rastignac, in the Pere Goriot, says 15 to Paris, I said to London, "a nous deux." I desired to obtain a professorship of either physiology or comparative anatomy, and as vacancies occurred I applied, but in vain. My friend, Professor Tyndall, and I were candidates at the same time, he for the chair of physics and I for that of 20 natural history in the University of Toronto, which, fortu- nately, as it turned out, would not look at either of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of respect for To- ronto, but because I soon made up my mind that London was the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined 25 the inducements to leave it, which have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post Forbes had vacated of Paleontologist 30 and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former point-blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, tell- ing Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give up natural history as soon as I could get a 14 Selections from Huxley physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been paleonto- logical. At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm 5 conviction that I should break down every time I opened my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever ad- dressed, on a Friday evening at the Royal Institution, in 10 1852. Yet, I must confess to having been guilty, malgre moij of as much public speaking as most of my contempo- raries, and for the last ten years it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I used to pity myself for having to go through this training, but I am now more disposed to 15 compassionate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever friendly hearers at the Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my oratorical experiments. The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at 20 the end of the day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look back and the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a 25 mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top. [But if_J may speak of__the_ objfcts.J[ have had_more__pr Tess definitely^m view since Ibegan__the ascent of_jnyJiilJock r -they_are__brjefly_ these ^ To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to for- 30 ward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought Autobiography 15 and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off. It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific fame 5 which I may have permitted myself to entertain to other ends; to the popularization of science; to the development and organization of scientific education; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clerical- 10 ism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to what- ever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science. In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have been but one among many, and I shall be well content to 15 be remembered, or even not remembered, as such. Cir- cumstances, among which I am proud to reckon the devoted kindness of many friends, have led to my occupa- tion of various prominent positions, among which the presi- dency of the Royal Society is the highest. It would be 20 mock modesty on my part, with these and other scientific honors which have been bestowed upon me, to pretend that I have not succeeded in the career which I have fol- lowed, rather because I was driven into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid I should not count even 25 these things as marks of success if I could not hope that I had somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the New Reformation. LETTERS* (1852-1892) [To Miss Heathorn. London, November 13, 1852. On learning that the Royal Medal was to be conferred upon him for his paper on the Medusae.] Going last week to the Royal Society's library for a 5 book, and like the boy in church " thinkin' o' naughten," when I went in, Weld, the Assistant Secretary, said, " Well, I congratulate you." I confess I did not see at that moment what any mortal man had to congratulate 'me about. I had a deuced bad cold, with rheumatism 10 in my head ; it was a beastly November day and I was very grumpy, so I inquired in a state of mild surprise what might be the matter. Whereupon I learnt that the Medal had been conferred at the meeting of the Council on the day before. I was very pleased and I thought you would 15 be so too, and I thought moreover that it was a fine lever to help us on, and if I could have sent a letter to you immediately I should have sat down and have written one to you on the spot. As it is I have waited for official confirmation and a convenient season. 20 And, now, shall I be very naughty and make a con- fession? The thing that a fortnight ago (before I got it) I thought so much of, I give you my word I do not care * These letters are republished here by permission of D.' Apple- ton and Company. 16 Letters 1 7 a pin for. I am sick of it and ashamed of having thought so much of it, and the congratulations I get give me a sort of internal sardonic grin. I think this has come about partly because I did not get the official confirmation of what I had heard for some days, and with my habit of facing 5 the ill side of things I came to the conclusion that Weld had made a mistake, and I went in thought through the whole enormous mortification of having to explain to those to whom I had mentioned it that it was quite a mistake. I found that all this, when I came to look at it, 10 was by no means so dreadful as it seemed quite bear- able in short and then I laughed at myself and have cared nothing about the whole concern ever since. In truth I do not think that I am in the proper sense of the word ambitious. I have an enormous longing after the 15 highest and best in all shapes a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests. The honors of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judg- 20 ment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. God forgive me if I do them any great wrong. I feel and know that all the rewards and honors in the 25 world will ever be worthless for me as soon as they are obtained. I know that always, as now, they will make me more sad than joyful. I know that nothing that could be done would give me the pure and heartfelt joy and peace of mind that your love has given me, and, 30 please God, shall give for many a long year to come, and yet my demon says work! work! you shall not even love unless you work. Not blinded by any vanity, then; I hope, but viewing 1 8 Selections from Huxley this stroke of fortune as respects its public estimation only, I think I must look upon the award of this medal as the turning point of my life, as the finger-post teaching me as clearly as anything can what is the true career that 5 lies open before me. For whatever may be my own private estimation of it, there can be no doubt as to the general feeling about this thing, and in case of my candi- dature for any office it would have the very greatest weight. As you will have seen by my last letter, it only 10 strengthens and confirms the conclusion I had come to. Bid me God-speed then it is all I want to labor cheer- fully. [To Miss Heathorn. London, November 28, 1852. On the funeral of the Duke of Wellington.] 15 You will hear all the details of the Great Duke's state funeral from the papers much better than I can tell you them. I went to the Cathedral (St. Paul's) and had the good fortune to get a capital seat in front, close to the great door by which every one entered. It was bitter 20 cold, a keen November wind blowing right in, and as I was there from eight till three, I expected nothing less than rheumatic fever the next day; however, I didn't get it. It was pitiful to see the poor old Marquis of Anglesey a year older than the Duke standing with 25 bare head in the keen wind close to me for more than three quarters of an hour. It was impressive enough the great interior lighted up by a single line of light running along the whole circuit of the cornice, and an- other encircling the dome, and casting a curious illumina- 30 tion over the masses of uniforms which filled the great space. The best of our people were there and passed close to me, but the only face that made any great impression Letters 19 upon my memory was that of Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde. Fancy a very large, broad-winged, and fierce-looking hawk in uniform. Such an eye ! When the coffin and the mourners had passed I closed up with the soldiers and went up under the dome, where 5 I heard the magnificent service in full perfection. All of it, however, was but stage trickery compared with the noble simplicity of the old man's life. How the old stoic, used to his iron bed and hard hair pillow, would have smiled at all the pomp submitting to that, how- 10 ever, and all other things necessary to the " carrying on of the Queen's