Reminiscences of Huxley

THE recent publication of an admirable memoir of Huxley, by his son Leonard,¹ has awakened in me old memories of some of the pleasantest scenes I have ever known. The book is written in a spirit of charming frankness, and is thickly crowded with details not one of which could well be spared. A notable feature is the copiousness of the extracts from familiar letters, in which everything is faithfully reproduced, even to the genial nonsense that abounds, or the big, big D that sometimes, though rarely, adds its pungent flavor. Huxley was above all things a man absolutely simple and natural; he never posed, was never starched, or prim, or on his good behavior; and he was nothing if not playful. A biography that brings him before us, robust and lifelike on every page, as this book does, is surely a model biography. A brief article, like the present, cannot even attempt to do justice to it, but I am moved to jot down some of the reminiscences and reflections which it has awakened.

My first introduction to the fact of Huxley’s existence was in February, 1861, when I was a sophomore at Harvard. The second serial number of Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, which had just arrived from London, and on which I was feasting my soul, contained an interesting reference to Huxley’s views concerning a “ pre-geologic past of unknown duration.” In the next serial number a footnote informed the reader that the phrase “ persistence of force,” since become so famous, was suggested by Huxley, as avoiding an objection which Spencer had raised to the current expression “ conservation of force.” Further references to Huxley, as also to Tyndall, in the course of the book, left me with a vague conception of the three friends as, after a certain fashion, partners in the business of scientific research and generalization.

Some such vague conception was developed in the mind of the general public into divers droll misconceptions. Even as Spencer’s famous phrase, “survival of the fittest,” which he suggested as preferable to “natural selection,” is by many people ascribed to Darwin, so we used to hear wrathful allusions to “ Huxley’s Belfast Address,” and similar absurdities. The climax was reached in 1876, when Huxley and his wife made a short visit to the United States. Early in that year Tyndall had married a daughter of Lord Claud Hamilton, brother of the Duke of Abercorn, and one fine morning in August we were gravely informed by the newspapers that “ Huxley and his titled bride ” had just arrived in New York. For our visitors, who had left at home in London seven goodly children, some of them approaching maturity, this item of news was a source of much merriment.

To return to my story, it was not long before my notion of Huxley came to be that of a very sharply defined and powerful individuality; for such he appeared in his Lectures on the Origin of Species and in his Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, both published in 1863. Not long afterward, in reading the lay sermon on The Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge, I felt that here was a poetic soul whom one could not help loving. In those days I fell in with Youmans, who had come back from England bubbling and brimming over with racy anecdotes about the philosophers and men of science. Of course the Soapy Sam incident was not forgotten, and Youmans’s version of it, which was purely from hearsay, could make no pretension to verbal accuracy ; nevertheless it may be worth citing. Mr. Leonard Huxley has carefully compared several versions from eye and ear witnesses, together with his father’s own comments, and I do not know where one could find a more striking illustration of the difficulty of attaining absolute accuracy in writing even contemporary history.

As I heard the anecdote from Youmans : It was at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, soon after the publication of Darwin’s epoch-making book, and while people in general were wagging their heads at it, that the subject came up for discussion before a fashionable and hostile audience. Samuel Wilberforce, the plausible and self-complacent Bishop of Oxford, commonly known as “ Soapy Sam,” launched out in a rash speech, conspicuous for its ignorant misstatements, and highly seasoned with appeals to the prejudices of the audience, upon whose lack of intelligence the speaker relied. Near him sat Huxley, already eminent as a man of science, and known to look favorably upon Darwinism, but more or less youthful withal, only five-and-thirty, so that the bishop anticipated sport in badgering him. At the close of his speech he suddenly turned upon Huxley and begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was really willing to be regarded as the descendant of a monkey. Eager self - confidence had blinded the bishop to the tactical blunder in thus coarsely inviting a retort. Huxley was instantly upon his feet with a speech demolishing the bishop’s card house of mistakes; and at the close he observed that since a question of personal preferences had been very improperly brought into the discussion of a scientific theory, he felt free to confess that if the alternatives were descent, on the one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a bishop of the English Church who could stoop to such misrepresentations and sophisms as the audience had lately listened to, he should declare in favor of the monkey !

Now this was surely not what Huxley said, nor how he said it. His own account is that, at Soapy Sam’s insolent taunt, he simply whispered to his neighbor, Sir Benjamin Brodie, “ The Lord hath delivered him into my hands ! ” a remark which that excellent old gentleman received with a stolid stare. Huxley sat quiet until the chairman called him up. His concluding retort seems to have been most carefully reported by John Richard Green, then a student at Oxford, in a letter to his friend, Boyd Dawkins : “ I asserted — and I repeat— that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” This can hardly be accurate ; no electric effect could have been wrought by so long-winded a sentiment. I agree with a writer in Macmillan’s Magazine that this version is “ much too Green,” but it doubtless gives the purport of what Huxley probably said in half as many but far more picturesque and fitting words. I have a feeling that the electric effect is best preserved in the Youmans version, in spite of its manifest verbal inaccuracy. It is curious to read that in the ensuing buzz of excitement a lady fainted, and had to be carried from the room; but the audience were in general quite alive to the bishop’s blunder in manners and tactics, and, with the genuine English love of fair play, they loudly applauded Huxley. From that time forth it was recognized that he was not the sort of man to be browbeaten. As for Bishop Wilberforce, he carried with him from the affray no bitterness, but was always afterward most courteous to his castigator.

When Huxley had his scrimmage with Congreve, in 1869, over the scientific aspects of Positivism, I was giving lectures to postgraduate classes at Harvard on the Positive Philosophy. I never had any liking for Comte or his ideas, but entertained an absurd notion that the epithet “ Positive ” was a proper and convenient one to apply to scientific methods and scientific philosophy in general. In the course of the discussion I attacked sundry statements of Huxley with quite unnecessary warmth, for such is the superfluous belligerency of youth. The World reported my lectures in full, insomuch that each one filled six or seven columns, and the editor, Manton Marble, sent copies regularly to Huxley and others. Four years afterward I went to London, to spend some time there in finishing Cosmic Philosophy and getting it through the press. I had corresponded with Spencer for several years, and soon after my arrival he gave one of his exquisite little dinners at his own lodgings. Spencer’s omniscience extended to the kitchen, and as composer of a menu neither Carême nor Francatelli could have surpassed him. The other guests were Huxley, Tyndall, Lewes, and Hughlings Jackson. Huxley took but little notice of me, and I fancied that something in those lectures must have offended him. But two or three weeks later Spencer took me to the dinner of the x Club, all the members of which were present except Lubbock. When the coffee was served Huxley brought his chair around to my side, and talked with me the rest of the evening. My impression was that he was the cosiest man I had ever met. He ended by inviting me to his house for the next Sunday at six, for what he called “ tall tea.”

This was the introduction to a series of experiences so delightful that, if one could only repeat them, the living over again all the bad quarters of an hour in one’s lifetime would not be too high a price to pay. I was already at home in several London households, but nowhere was anything so sweet as the cordial welcome in that cosy drawing-room on Marlborough Place, where the great naturalist became simply “Pater ” (pronounced Patter), to be pulled about and tousled and kissed by those lovely children ; nor could anything so warm the heart of an exile (if so melancholy a term can properly be applied to anybody sojourning in beloved London) as to have the little seven-year-old miss climb into one’s lap and ask for fairy tales, whereof I luckily had an ample repertoire. Nothing could be found more truly hospitable than the long dinner table, where our beaming host used to explain, “ Because this is called a tea is no reason why a man should n’t pledge his friend in a stoup of Rhenish, or even in a noggin of Glenlivet, if he has a mind to.” At the end of our first evening I was told that a plate would be set for me every Sunday, and I must never fail to come. After two or three Sundays, however, I began to feel afraid of presuming too much upon the cordiality of these new friends, and so, by a superhuman effort of self-control, and at the cost of unspeakable wretchedness, I stayed away. For this truancy I was promptly called to account, a shamefast confession was extorted, and penalties, vague but dire, were denounced in case of a second offense; so I never missed another Sunday evening till the time came for leaving London.

Part of the evening used to be spent in the little overcrowded library, before a blazing fire, while we discussed all manner of themes, scientific or poetical, practical or philosophical, religious or æsthetic. Huxley, like a true epicure, smoked the sweet little brierwood pipe, but he seemed to take especial satisfaction in seeing me smoke very large fullflavored Havanas from a box which some Yankee admirer had sent him. Whatever subject came uppermost in our talk, I was always impressed with the fullness and accuracy of his information and the keenness of his judgments ; but that is, of course, what any appreciative reader can gather from his writings. Unlike Spencer, he was an omnivorous reader. Of historical and literary knowledge, such as one usually gets from books, Spencer had a great deal, and of an accurate and well-digested sort; he had some incomprehensible way of absorbing it through the pores of his skin, — at least, he never seemed to read books. Huxley, on the other hand, seemed to read everything worth reading, — history, politics, metaphysics, poetry, novels, even books of science; for perhaps it may not be superfluous to point out to the general world of readers that no great man of science owes his scientific knowledge to books. Huxley’s colossal knowledge of the animal kingdom was not based upon the study of Cuvier, Baer, and other predecessors, but upon direct personal examination of thousands of organisms, living and extinct. He cherished a wholesome contempt for mere bookishness in matters of science, and carried on war to the knife against the stupid methods of education in vogue forty years ago, when students were expected to learn something of chemistry or palæontology by reading about black oxide of manganese or the dentition of anoplotherium. A rash clergyman once, without further equipment in natural history than some desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in some sundry magazine articles, in which he made himself uncommonly merry at Huxley’s expense. This was intended to draw the great man’s fire ; and as the batteries remained silent the author proceeded to write to Huxley, calling his attention to the articles, and at the same time, with mock modesty, asking advice as to the further study of these deep questions. Huxley’s answer was brief and to the point: “Take a cockroach and dissect it! ”

Too exclusive devotion, however, to scalpel and microscope may leave a man of science narrow and one-sided, dead to some of the most interesting aspects of human life. But Huxley was keenly alive in all directions, and would have enjoyed mastering all branches of knowledge, if the days had only been long enough. He found rest and recreation in change of themes, and after a long day’s scientific work at South Kensington would read Sybel’s French Revolution, or Lange’s History of Materialism, or the last new novel, until the witching hour of midnight. This reading was in various languages. Without a university education, Huxley had a remarkably good knowledge of Latin. He was fond of Spinoza, and every once in a while, in the course of our chats, he would exclaim, “ Come, now, let’s see what old Benedict has to say about it! There’s no better man.” Then he would take the book from its shelf, and while we both looked on the page he would give voice to his own comments in a broad and liberal paraphrase that showed his sound and scholarlike appreciation of every point in the Latin text. A spirited and racy version it would have been had he ever undertaken to translate Spinoza. So I remember saying once, but he replied : “ We must leave it for young Fred Pollock, whom I think you have seen ; he is shy and does n’t say much, but I can tell you, whatever he does is sure to be amazingly good.” They who are familiar with Sir Frederick Pollock’s noble book on Spinoza, to say nothing of his other works, will recognize the truth of the prophecy.

Huxley had also a mastery of French, Italian, and German, and perhaps of some other modern languages. Angelo Heilprin says that he found him studying Russian, chiefly in order to acquire a thorough familiarity with the work of the great anatomist, Kovalevsky. How far he may have carried that study I know not; but his son tells us that it was also in middle life that he began Greek, in order to read at first hand Aristotle and the New Testament. To read Aristotle with critical discernment requires an extremely good knowledge of Greek ; and if Huxley got so far as that, we need not be surprised at hearing that he could enjoy the Homeric poems in the original.

I suppose there were few topics in the heavens or on earth that did not get overhauled at that little library fireside. At one time it would be politics, and my friend would thank God that, whatever mistakes he might have made in life, he had never bowed the knee to either of those intolerable humbugs, Louis Napoleon or Benjamin Disraeli. Without admitting that the shifty Jew deserved to be placed on quite so low a plane as Hortense Beauharnais’s feeble son, we can easily see how distasteful he would be to a man of Huxley’s earnest and whole-souled directness. But antipathy to Disraeli did not in this case mean fondness for Gladstone. In later years, when Huxley was having his great controversy with Gladstone, we find him writing : “ Seriously, it is to me a grave thing that the destinies of this country should at present be seriously influenced by a man who, whatever he may be in the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in those which I do understand.” In 1873 there occurred a brief passage at arms between Gladstone and Herbert Spencer, in which the great statesman’s intellect looked amusingly small and commonplace in contrast with the giant mind of the philosopher. The defeated party was left with no resources except rhetorical artifice to cover his retreat, and his general aspect was foxy, not to say jesuitical. At least so Huxley declared, and I thoroughly agreed with him. Yet surely it would be a very inadequate and unjust estimate of Gladstone which should set him down as a shuffler, and there leave the matter. From the statesman’s point of view it might be contended that Gladstone was exceptionally direct and frank. But a statesman is seldom, if ever, called upon to ascertain and exhibit the fundamental facts of a case without bias and in the disinterested mood which Science demands of her votaries. The statesman’s business is to accomplish sundry concrete political purposes, and he measures statements primarily, not by their truth, but by their availableness as means toward a practical end. Pure science cultivates a widely different habit of mind. One could no more expect a prime minister, as such, to understand Huxley’s attitude in presence of a scientific problem than a deaf-mute to comprehend a symphony of Beethoven. Gladstone’s aim was to score a point against his adversary, at whatever cost, whereas Huxley was as quick to detect his own mistakes as anybody else’s ; and such differences in temperament were scarcely compatible with mutual understanding.

If absolute loyalty to truth, involving complete self-abnegation in face of the evidence, be the ideal aim of the scientific inquirer, there have been few men in whom that ideal has been so perfectly realized as in Huxley. If ever he were tempted by some fancied charm of speculation to swerve a hair’s breadth from the strict line of fact, the temptation was promptly slaughtered and mademo sign. For intellectual integrity he was a spotless Sir Galahad. I believe there was nothing in life which he dreaded so much as the sin of allowing his reason to be hoodwinked by personal predilections, or whatever Francis Bacon would have called “idols of the cave.” Closely connected with this ever present feeling was a holy horror of a priori convictions of logical necessity and of long festoons of deductive argument suspended from such airy supports. The prime necessity for him was to appeal at every step to observation and experiment, and in the absence of such verification to rest content with saying, “ I do not know.” It is to Huxley, I believe, that we owe the epithet “ Agnostic,” for which all men of scientific proclivities owe him a debt of gratitude, since it happened to please the popular fancy, and at once supplanted the label “ Positivist ” which used to be ruthlessly pasted upon all such men, in spite of their protests and struggles. No better word than “ Agnostic ” could be found to express Huxley’s mental temperament, but with anything like a formulated system of agnosticism he had little more to do than with other “ isms.” He used to smile at the formidable parade which Lewes was making with his Objective Method and Verification, in which capital letters did duty for part of the argument; and as for Dean Mansel’s elaborate agnosticism, in his Limits of Religious Thought, Huxley, taking a hint from Hogarth, used to liken him to a (theological) innkeeper who has climbed upon the signboard of the rival (scientific) inn, and is busily sawing it off, quite oblivious of the gruesome fact that he is sitting upon the unsupported end! But while he thus set little store by current agnostic metaphysics, Huxley’s intellectual climate, if I may so speak, was one of perfect agnosticism. In intimate converse with him, he always seemed to me a thoroughgoing and splendid representative of Hume; indeed, in his writings he somewhere lets fall a remark expressing a higher regard for Hume than for Kant. It was at this point that we used to part company in our talks : so long as it was a question of Berkeley we were substantially agreed, but when it came to Hume we agreed to differ.

It is this complete agnosticism of temperament, added to his abiding dread of intellectual dishonesty, that explains Huxley’s attitude toward belief in a future life. He was not a materialist; nobody saw more clearly than he the philosophic flimsiness of materialism, and he looked with strong disapproval upon the self - complacent negations of Ludwig Buechner. Nevertheless, with regard to the belief in an immortal soul his position was avowedly agnostic, with perhaps just the slightest possible tacit though reluctant leaning toward the negative. This slight bias was apparently due to two causes. First, it is practically beyond the power of science to adduce evidence in support of the soul’s survival of the body, since the whole question lies beyond the bounds of our terrestrial experience. Huxley was the last man to assume that the possibilities of nature are limited by our experience, and I think he would have seen the force of the argument that, in questions where evidence is in the nature of the case inaccessible, our inability to produce it does not afford even the slightest prima facie ground for a negative verdict.² Nevertheless, he seems to have felt as if the absence of evidence did afford some such prima facie ground; for in a letter to Charles Kingsley, written in 1860, soon after the sudden death of his first child, he says : “ Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier, I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me . . . and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind. To which my only reply was, and is, O devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other, as the penalty, still I will not lie.” This striking declaration shows that the second cause of the bias was the dread of self-deception. It was a noble exhibition of intellectual honesty raised to a truly Puritanic fervor of self-abnegation. Just because life is sweet, and the love of it well-nigh irrepressible, must all such feelings be suspected as tempters, and frowned out of our temple of philosophy. Rather than run any risk of accepting a belief because it is pleasant, let us incur whatever chance there may be of error in the opposite direction ; thus we shall at least avoid the one unpardonable sin. Such, I think, was the shape which the case assumed in Huxley’s mind. To me it takes a very different shape; but I cannot help feeling that mankind is going to be helped by such stanch intellectual integrity as his far more than it is going to be helped by consoling doctrines of whatever sort; and therefore his noble self-abnegation, even though it may have been greater than was called for, is worthy of most profound and solemn homage.

But we did not spend the whole of the evening in the little library. Brierwood and Havana at length gave out, and the drawing-room had its claims upon us. There was a fondness for music in the family, and it was no unusual thing for us to gather around the piano and sing psalms, after which there would perhaps be a Beethoven sonata, or one of Chopin’s nocturnes, or perhaps a song. I can never forget the rich contralto voice of one bright and charming daughter, since passed away, or the refrain of an old-fashioned song which she sometimes sang about “ My love, that loved me long ago.” From music it was an easy transition to scraps of Browning or Goethe, leading to various disquisition. Of mirth and badinage there was always plenty. I dare say there was not another room in London where so much exuberant nonsense might have been heard. It is no uncommon thing for masters of the Queen’s English to delight in torturing it, and Huxley enjoyed that sort of pastime as much as James Russell Lowell. “Smole” and “declone” were specimens of the preterites that used to fall from his lips ; and as for puns, the air was blue with them. I cannot recall one of them now, but the following example, from a letter of 1855 inviting Hooker to his wedding, will suffice to show the quality : “ I terminate my Baccalaureate and take my degree of M. A. trimony (is n’t that atrocious ?) on Saturday, July 21.”

One evening the conversation happened to touch upon the memorable murder of Dr. Parkman by Dr. Webster, and I expressed some surprise that an expert chemist, like Webster, should have been so slow in getting his victim’s remains out of the way. “ Well,” quoth Huxley, “ there’s a good deal of substance in a human body. It is n’t easy to dispose of so much corpus delicti,— a reflection which has frequently deterred me when on the point of killing somebody.” At such remarks a soft ripple of laughter would run about the room, with murmurs of “ Oh, Pater ! ” It was just the same in his lectures to his students. In the simple old experiment illustrating reflex action, a frog, whose brain had been removed, was touched upon the right side of the back with a slightly irritating acid, and would forthwith reach up with his right hind leg and rub the place. The next thing in order was to tie the right leg, whereupon the left leg would come up, and by dint of strenuous effort reach the itching spot. One day the stretching was so violent as to result in a particularly elaborate and comical somersault on the part of the frog, whereupon Huxley exclaimed, “You see, it does n’t require much of a brain to be an acrobat! ” In an examination on anatomy a very callow lad got the valves of the heart wrong, putting the mitral on the right side ; but Huxley took compassion on him, with the remark, “ Poor little beggar ! I never got them correctly myself until I reflected that a bishop was never in the right! ” On another occasion, at the end of a lecture, he asked one of the students if he understood it all. The student replied, “ All, sir, but one part, during which you stood between me and the blackboard.” “ Ah,” rejoined Huxley, “ I did my best to make myself clear, but could not make myself transparent! ,³

Probably the most tedious bore on earth is the man who feels it incumbent on him always to be facetious and to turn everything into a joke. Lynch law is about the right sort of thing for such persons. Huxley had nothing in common with them. His drollery was the spontaneous bubbling over of the seething fountains of energy. The world’s strongest spirits, from Shakespeare down, have been noted for playfulness. The prim and sober creatures who know neither how to poke fun nor to take it are apt to be the persons who are ridden by their work, — useful mortals after their fashion, mayhap, but not interesting or stimulating. Huxley’s playfulness lightened the burden of life for himself and for all with whom he came in contact. I seem to see him now, looking up from his end of the table,—for my place was usually at Mrs. Huxley’s end, — his dark eyes kindling under their shaggy brows, and a smile of indescribable beauty spreading over the swarthy face, as prelude to some keen and pithy but never unkind remark. Electric in energy, formidable in his incisiveness, he smote hard ; but there was nothing cruel about him, nor did he ever inflict pain through heedless remarks. That would have been a stupidity of which he was incapable. His quickness and sureness of perception, joined with his abounding kindliness, made him a man of almost infinite tact. I had not known him long before I felt that the ruling characteristic in his nature was tenderness. He reminded me of one of Charles Reade’s heroes, Colonel Dujardin, who had the eye of a hawk, but down somewhere in the depths of that eye of a hawk there was the eye of a dove. It was chiefly the sympathetic quality in the man that exerted upon me an ever strengthening spell. My experiences in visiting him had one notable feature, which I found it hard to interpret. After leaving the house, at the close of a Sunday evening, the outside world used to seem cold and lonely for being cut off from that presence ; yet on the next Sunday, at the moment of his cordial greeting, a feeling always came over me that up to that moment I had never fully taken in how lovable he was, I had never quite done him justice. In other words, no matter how vivid the image which I carried about in my mind, it instantly seemed dim and poor in presence of the reality. Such feelings are known to lovers ; in other relations of life they are surely unusual. I was speaking about this to my dear old friend, the late Alexander Macmillan, when he suddenly exclaimed : “ You may well feel so, my boy. I tell you, there is so much real Christianity in Huxley that if it were parceled out among all the men, women, and children in the British Islands, there would be enough to save the soul of every one of them, and plenty to spare ! ”

I have said that Huxley was never unkind ; it is perhaps hardly necessary to tell his readers that he could be sharp and severe, if the occasion required. I have heard his wife say that he never would allow himself to be preyed upon by bores, and knew well how to get rid of them. Some years after the time of which I have been writing, I dined one evening at the Savile Club with Huxley, Spencer, and James Sime. As we were chatting over our coffee, some person unknown to us came in and sat down on a sofa near by. Presently, this man, becoming interested in the conversation, cut short one of our party, and addressed a silly remark to Spencer in reply to something which he had been saying. Spencer’s answer was civil, but brief, and not inviting. Nothing abashed, the stranger kept on, and persisted in forcing himself into the conversation, despite our bleak frowns and arctic glances. It was plain that something must be done, and while the intruder was aiming a question directly at Huxley, the latter turned his back upon him. This was intelligible even to asinine apprehension, and the remainder of our evening was unmolested.

I never knew (not being inquisitive) just when the Huxleys began having their “ tall teas ” on Sunday evenings ; but during that first winter I seldom met any visitors at their house, except once or twice Ray Lankester and Michael Foster. Afterward, Huxley with his wife, on their visit to America, spent a few summer days with my family at Petersham, where the great naturalist learned for the first time what a tin dipper is. Once, in London, in speaking about the starry heavens, I had said that I never could make head or tail of any constellation except the Dipper, and of course everybody must recognize in that the resemblance to a dipper. To my surprise, one of the young ladies asked, “ What is a dipper ? ” My effort at explanation went far enough to evoke the idea of “ a ladle,” but with that approximation I was fain to let the matter rest until that August day in New England, when, after a tramp in the woods, my friends quaffed cool mountain water from a dipper, and I was told that not only the name, but the thing, is a Yankee notion.

Some time after this I made several visits to England, giving lectures at the Royal Institution and elsewhere, and saw the Huxleys often, and on one occasion, with my wife, spent a fortnight or so at their home in Marlborough Place. The Sunday evenings had come to be a time for receiving friends, without any of the formality that often attaches to “ receptions.” Half a dozen or more would drop in for the “ high tea.” I then noticed the change in the adjective, and observed that the phrase and the institution were not absolutely confined to the Huxley household ; but their origin is still for me enshrouded in mystery, like the “ empire of the Toltecs.” After the informal and jolly supper others would come in, until the company might number from twenty to thirty. Among the men whom I recall to mind (the married ones accompanied by their wives, of course) were Mark Pattison, Lecky, and J. R. Green, Burdon Sanderson and Lauder Brunton, Alma Tadema, Sir James Stephen and his brother Leslie, Sir Frederick Pollock, Lord Arthur Russell, Frederic Harrison, Spencer Walpole, Romanes, and Ralston. Some of these I met for the first time ; others were old friends. Nothing could be more charming than the graceful simplicity with which all were entertained, nor could anything be more evident than the affectionate veneration which everybody felt for the host.

The last time that I saw my dear friend was early in 1883, just before coming home to America. I found him lying on the sofa, too ill to say much, but not too ill for a jest or two at his own expense. The series of ailments had begun which were to follow him for the rest of his days. I was much concerned about him, but journeys to England had come to seem such a simple matter that the thought of its being our last meeting never entered my mind. A few letters passed back and forth with the lapse of years, the last one (in 1894) inquiring when I was likely to be able to come and visit him in the pretty home which he had made in Sussex, where he was busy with “ digging in the garden and spoiling grandchildren.” When the news of the end came, it was as a sudden and desolating shock.

There were few magazines or newspapers which did not contain articles about Huxley, and in general those articles were considerably more than the customary obituary notice. They were apt to be more animated than usual, as if they had caught something from the blithe spirit of the man ; and they gave so many details as to show the warm and widespread interest with which he was regarded. One thing, however, especially struck me. While the writers of these articles seemed familiar with Huxley’s philosophical and literary writings, with his popular lectures on scientific subjects and his controversies with sundry clergymen, they seemed to know nothing whatever about his original scientific work. It was really a singular spectacle, if one pauses to think about it. Here are a score of writers engaged in paying tribute to a man as one of the great scientific lights of the age, and yet, while they all know something about what he would have considered his fugitive work, not one of them so much as alludes to the cardinal achievements in virtue of which his name marks an epoch ! It is very much as if the biographers of Newton were to enlarge upon his official labors at the Mint and his theory of light, while preserving a dead silence as to gravitation and fluxions. A few words concerning Huxley’s work will therefore not seem superfluous. A few words are all that can here be given; I cannot pretend even to make a wellrounded sketch.

In one respect there was a curious similarity between the beginnings of Huxley’s scientific career and of Darwin’s. Both went, as young men, on long voyages into the southern hemisphere, in ships of the royal navy, and from the study of organisms encountered on these voyages both were led to theories of vast importance. Huxley studied with keen interest and infinite patience the jellyfish and polyps floating on the surface of the tropical seas through which his ship passed. Without books or advisers, and with scant aid of any sort except his microscope, which had to be tied to keep it steady, he scrutinized and dissected these lowly forms of life, and made drawings and diagrams illustrating the intricacies of their structure, until he was able, by comparison, to attain some very interesting results. During four years, he says, “ I sent home communication after communication to the Linnæan Society, with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last of 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 a memoir On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusæ ; and it proved to be his dove, though he did not know it until his return to England, a year later. Then he found that his paper had been published, and in 1851, at the age of twenty-six, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He went on writing papers giving sundry results of his observations, and the very next year received the society’s Royal medal, a supreme distinction which he shared with Joule, Stokes, and Humboldt. In the address upon the presentation of the medal, the president, Lord Rosse, declared that Huxley had not only for the first time adequately described the Medusæ and laid down rational principles for classifying them, but had inaugurated “ a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology.”

In other words, the youthful Huxley had made a discovery that went to the bottom of things ; and as in most if not all such cases, he had enlarged our knowledge not only of facts, but of methods. It was the beginning of a profound reconstruction of the classification of animals, extinct and living. In the earlier half of the century the truest classification was Cuvier’s. That great genius emancipated himself from the notion that groups of animals should be arranged in an ascending or descending series, and he fully proved the existence of three divergent types, — Vertebrata, Mollusca, and Articulata. Some of the multitude of animals lower or less specialized than these he grouped by mistake along with Mollusca or Articulata, while all the rest he threw into a fourth class, which he called Radiata. It was evident that this type was far less clearly defined than the three higher types. In fact, it was open to the same kind of objection that used to be effectively urged against Max Müller’s so-called Turanian group of languages : it was merely a negation. Radiata were simply animals that were neither Articulata nor Mollusca nor Vertebrata ; in short, they were a motley multitude, about which there was a prevailing confusion of ideas at the time when young Huxley began the study of jellyfish.

We all know how it was the work of the great Esthonian embryologist, Baer, that turned Herbert Spencer toward his discovery of the law of evolution. It is therefore doubly interesting to know that in these early studies Huxley also profited by his knowledge of Baer’s methods and results. It all tended toward a theory of evolution, although Baer himself never got so far as evolution in the modern sense; and as for Huxley, when he studied Medusæ, he was not concerned with any general theory whatever, but only with putting into shape what he saw.

And what he saw was, that throughout their development the Medusæ consist of two foundation membranes, or delicate weblike tissues of cells, — one forming the outer integument, the other doing duty as stomach lining, — and that there was no true body cavity with blood vessels. He showed that groups apparently quite dissimilar, such as the hydroid and sertularian polyps, the Physophoridæ and sea anemones, are constructed upon the same plan ; and so he built up his famous group of C7#x0153;lenterata, or animals with only a stomach cavity, as contrasted with all higher organisms, which might be called Cœlomata, or animals with a true body cavity, containing a stomach with other viscera and blood vessels. In all Cœlomata, from the worm up to man, there is a third foundation membrane. Thus the Cuvierian group of Radiata was broken up, and the way was prepared for this far more profound and true arrangement : (1) Protozoa, such as the amœba and sponges, in which there is no distinct separation of parts performing different functions ; (2) Cœlenterata, in which there is a simple differentiation between the inside which accumulates energy and the outside which expends it; and (3) Cœlomata, in which the inside contains a more or less elaborate system of distinct organs devoted to nutrition and reproduction, while the outside is more or less differentiated into limbs and sense organs for interaction with the outer world. Though not yet an evolutionist, Huxley could not repress the prophetic thought that Cœlenterata are ancient survivals, representing a stage through which higher animal types must once have passed.

As further elaborated by Huxley, the development above the cœlenterate stage goes on in divergent lines; stopping abruptly in some directions, in others going on to great lengths. Thus, in the direction taken by echinoderms, the physical possibilities are speedily exhausted, and we stop with starfishes and holothurians. But among Annuloida, as Huxley called them, there is more flexibility, and we keep on till we reach the true Articulata in the highly specialized insects, arachnoids, and crustaceans. It is still more interesting to follow the Molluscoida, through which we are led, on the one hand, to the true Mollusca, reaching their culmination in the nautilus and octopus, and, on the other hand, to the Tunicata, and so on to the vertebrates.

In the comparative anatomy of vertebrates, also, Huxley’s achievements were in a high degree original and remarkable. First in importance, perhaps, was his classification of birds, in which their true position and relationships were for the first time disclosed. Huxley showed that all birds, extinct and living, must be arranged in three groups, of which the first is represented by the fossil archæopteryx with its handlike wing and lizardlike tail, the second by the ostrich and its congeners, and the third by all other living birds. He further demonstrated the peculiarly close relationship between birds and reptiles through the extinct dinosaurs. In all these matters his powerful originality was shown in the methods by which these important results were reached. Every new investigation which he made seemed to do something toward raising the study of biology to a higher plane, as for example his celebrated controversy with Owen on the true nature of the vertebrate skull. The mention of Owen reminds us that it was also Huxley who overthrew Cuvier’s order of Quadrumana, by proving that apes are not fourhanded, but have two hands and two feet; he showed that neither in limbs nor in brain does man present differences from other primates that are of higher than generic value. Indeed, there were few corners of the animal world, past or present, which Huxley did not at some time or other overhaul, and to our knowledge of which he did not make contributions of prime importance. The instances here cited may serve to show the kind of work which he did, but my mention of them is necessarily meagre. In the department of classification, the significance of which has been increased tenfold by the doctrine of evolution, his name must surely rank foremost among the successors of the mighty Cuvier.

Before 1860 the vastness and accuracy of Huxley’s acquirements and the soundness of his judgment were well understood by the men of his profession, insomuch that Charles Darwin, when about to publish The Origin of Species, said that there were three men in England upon whose judgment he relied ; if he could convince those three, he could afford to wait for the rest. The three were Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley, and he convinced them. How sturdily Huxley fought Darwin’s battles is inspiring to remember. Darwin rather shrank from controversy, and, while he welcomed candid criticism, seldom took any notice of ill-natured attacks. On one occasion, nevertheless, a somewhat ugly assault moved Darwin to turn and rend the assailant, which was easily and neatly done in two pages at the end of a scientific paper. Before publishing the paper, however, Darwin sent it to Huxley, authorizing him to omit the two pages if he should think it best. Huxley promptly canceled them, and sent Darwin a delicious little note, saying that the retort was so excellent that if it had been his own he should hardly have had virtue enough to suppress it; but although it was well deserved, he thought it would be better to refrain. “ If I say a savage thing, it is only 'pretty Fanny’s way ; ’ but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.” There was a friend worth having! There can be little doubt, I think, that, without a particle of rancor, Huxley did keenly feel the gaudium certaminis. He exclaimed among the trumpets, Ha! ha! and was sure to be in the thickest of the fight. His family seemed to think that the “ Gladstonian dose ” had a tonic effect upon him. When he felt too ill for scientific work, he was quite ready for a scrimmage with his friends the bishops. Not caring much for episcopophagy (as Huxley once called it), and feeling that controversy of that sort was but a slaying of the slain, I used to grudge the time that was given to it, and taken from other things. In 1879 he showed me the synopsis of a projected book on The Dog, which was to be an original contribution to the phylogenetic history of the order Carnivora. The reader who recalls his book on The Crayfish may realize what such a book about dogs would have been. It was interrupted and deferred, and finally pushed aside, by the thousand and one duties and cares that were thrust upon him, — work on government commissions, educational work, parish work, everything that a self - sacrificing and public-spirited man could be loaded with. In the later years, whenever I opened a magazine and found one of the controversial articles, I read it with pleasure, but sighed for the dog book.

I dare say, though, it was all for the best. “To smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science ; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying ; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognized as mine or not, so long as it is done,” — such were Huxley’s aims in life. And for these things, in the words of good Ben Jonson, “ I loved the man, and do honor to his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.”

John Fiske.