By far the larger number of American students who go abroad pass through
the English Channel, obtain a distant view of the mother country and,
after from one to three years in Germany, return with an exclusively
German education. Neither England nor France having been visited, the
implication is that the countries which produced Owen, Darwin, Huxley
and Balfour, or Lamarck, Cuvier, St. Hilaire and Pasteur have nothing to
offer the American student. This is not the fact; the fact is that
England and France are a half-century behind Germany in that kind of
university organization which attracts a foreign student and enables him
immediately to find his level and enter upon his research. English and
French universities until a very recent date either have been not so
fully prepared or have met the newcomer with practically insuperable
obstacles in the matter of a degree.
None the less, the student who has not breasted these obstacles for the
compensating advantages which the English and French schools offer has
made a serious mistake. He has brought back not an Old World education,
but an exclusively German education, with its splendidly sound and
unique features and with many inherent defects. Germany produces the
generals and the rank and file of the armies of science, but certainly
the commanders-in-chief, in biology at least, have been Englishmen. If
we find the highest exponents of purely inductive research in Germany,
we certainly find a better union of the inductive and deductive methods
in France and England. France leads in expression and style of thought,
although, upon the whole, less sound in substance than Germany. England
and France in her best period have given us the most far-reaching and
permanent generalizations in biology. It follows that the American
student who can afford the experience will profit most by placing
himself successively in the scientific atmosphere of Germany, France,
and England. My own post-graduate education was unfortunately not of
this three-sided type. None the less, it has always seemed a most
fortunate circumstance that in the spring of 1879 a letter from the
venerable Kitchen Parker led me to Cambridge and to the great privilege
of sitting under Balfour, the most brilliant and lovable of men. In the
following autumn Huxley’s lectures upon Comparative Zoology began in
October, and by entering this course I came to know personally this
great master and through him to enjoy the rare opportunity of meeting
Charles Darwin. After this experience, which was equally open to any
serious student of biology at that time, it is natural that I should
strongly advise those of you who are planning your foreign studies to
spend part of your time in England and endeavor to discern some of the
distinctive qualities of English men of science which Huxley so nobly
illustrated. You will pardon the personal element in the following
recollections of Huxley as a teacher and the rather informal review of
his life-work.
Huxley as a teacher can never be forgotten by any of his students. He
entered his lecture-room promptly as the clock was striking nine, rather
quickly and with his head bent forward “as if oppressive with its mind.”
He usually glanced attention to his class of about ninety and began
speaking before he reached his chair. He spoke between his lips, with
perfectly clear analysis, with thorough interest, and with philosophic
insight which was far above the average of his students. He used very
few charts, but handled the chalk with great skill, sketching out the
anatomy of an animal as if it were a transparent object. As in Darwin’s
face, and as in Erasmus Darwin’s, Buffon’s, and many other anatomists
with a strong sense of form, his eyes were heavily overhung by a
projecting forehead and eyebrows and seemed at times to look inward. His
lips were firm and closely set, with the expression of positiveness, and
the other feature which most marked him was the very heavy mass of hair
falling over his forehead, which he would frequently stroke or toss
back. Occasionally he would lighten up the monotony of anatomical
description by a bit of humor. I remember one instance which was
probably reminiscent of his famous tilt with Bishop Wilberforce at the
meeting of the British Association in 1860. Huxley was describing the
mammalian heart and had just distinguished between the tricuspid valve,
on the right side of the heart, and the bicuspid valve, on the left,
which you know resembles a bishop’s mitre, and hence is known as the
mitral valve. He said:
It is not easy to recall on which side these respective valves are
found, but I recommend this rule: you can easily remember that the
mitral is on the left, because a bishop is never known to be on the
right.
Huxley was the father of modern laboratory instruction, but in 1879 he
was so intensely engrossed with his own researches that he very seldom
came through the laboratory, which was ably directed by T. Jeffrey
Parker, assisted by G. B. Howes and W. Newton Parker, all of whom are
now professors, Howes having succeeded to Huxley’s chair. Each visit
therefore inspired a certain amount of terror, which was really
unwarranted, for Huxley always spoke in the kindest tones to his
students, although sometimes he could not resist making fun at their
expense. There was an Irish student who sat in front of me, whose
anatomical drawings in water-color were certainly most remarkable
productions. Huxley, in turning over his drawing-book, paused at a large
blur under which was carefully inscribed “sheep’s liver” and smilingly
said: “I am glad to know that is a liver; it reminds me as much of
Cologne Cathedral in a fog as of anything I have ever seen before.”
Fortunately the nationality of the student enabled him to fully
appreciate the humor.
The greatest event in the winter of 1879 was Darwin’s first and only
visit to the laboratory. They came in together, Huxley leading slowly
down the long, narrow room, pointing out the especial methods of
teaching, which he had originated and which are now universally adopted
in England and in this country. Darwin was instantly recognized by the
class as he entered and sent a thrill of curiosity down the room, for no
one present had ever seen him before. There was the widest possible
contrast in the two faces. Darwin’s grayish-white hair and bushy
eyebrows overshadowed a pair of deeply set blue eyes, which seemed to
image his wonderfully calm and deep vision of nature and at the same
time to emit benevolence. Huxley’s piercing black eyes and determined
and resolute face were full of admiration and, at the same time,
protection of his older friend. He said afterward: “You know, I have to
take care of him; in fact, I have always been Darwin’s bulldog,” and
this exactly expressed one of the many relations which existed so long
between the two men.
Huxley was not always fortunate in the intellectual caliber of the men
to whom he lectured in the Royal College of Science. Many of the younger
generation were studying in the universities, under Balfour at Cambridge
and under Rolleston at Oxford. However, Saville Kent, C. Lloyd Morgan,
George B. Howes, T. Jeffrey Parker and W. Newton Parker are
representative biologists who were directly trained by Huxley. Many
others, not his students, have expressed the deepest indebtedness to
him. Among these especially are Professor E. Ray Lankester, of Oxford,
and Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge. Huxley once said that he had
“discovered Foster.” He not only singled men out, but knew how to direct
and inspire them to investigate the most pressing problems of the day.
As it was, his thirty-one years of lectures would have produced a far
greater effect if they had been delivered from an Oxford, Cambridge or
Edinburgh chair. In fact, Huxley’s whole life would have been different,
in some ways more effective, in others less so, if the universities had
welcomed the young genius who was looking for a post and even cast his
eyes toward America in 1850, but in those early days of classical
prestige both seats of learning were dead to the science which it was
Huxley’s great service in support of Darwin to place beside physics in
the lead of all others in England. Moreover, Oxford, if not Cambridge,
could not long have sheltered such a wolf in the fold.
Huxley’s public addresses always gave the impression of being largely
impromptu, but he once told me: “I always think out carefully every word
I am going to say. There is no greater danger than the so-called
_inspiration of the moment_, which leads you to say something which is
not exactly true or which you would regret afterward. I sometimes envy
your countrymen their readiness and believe that a native American, if
summoned out of bed at midnight, could step to his window and speak well
upon any subject.” I told him I feared he had been slightly misinformed;
I feared that many American impromptu speeches were distinguished more
by a flow of language than of ideas. But Huxley was sometimes very
impressive when he did not speak. In 1879 he was strongly advocating the
removal of the Royal School of Mines from crowded Jermyn street to South
Kensington, a matter which is still being agitated. At a public dinner
given by the alumni of the school, who were naturally attached to the
old buildings, the chairman was indiscreet enough to make an attack upon
the policy of removal. He was vigorously applauded, when, to every one’s
consternation, Huxley, who was sitting at the chairman’s right, slowly
rose, paused a moment, and then silently skirted the tables and walked
out of the hall. A solemn pall fell over us, which lasted throughout the
dinner, and we were all glad to find an excuse to leave early.
In personal conversation Huxley was full of humor and greatly enjoyed
stories at his own expense. Such was the following:
In my early period as a lecturer I had very little confidence in my
general powers, but one thing I prided myself upon was clearness. I
was once talking of the brain before a large mixed audience and soon
began to feel that no one in the room understood me. Finally I saw the
thoroughly interested face of a woman auditor and took consolation in
delivering the remainder of the lecture directly to her. At the close,
my feeling as to her interest was confirmed when she came up and asked
if she might put one question upon a single point which she had not
quite understood. “Certainly,” I replied. “Now, Professor,” she said,
“is the cerebellum inside or outside of the skull?”
A story of his about babies is also characteristic:
When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her baby I never fail to
respond, and, while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of an
opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its feet turn in
and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.
Huxley’s life is as full of suggestion to the student as were his
lectures and his conversation. It illustrates the force of obtaining a
very broad view of the animal kingdom before we attempt to enter the
plane of higher generalization. Huxley’s training in embryology,
vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, palæontology, and geology was not
mapped out for him as for the modern university student. His prolonged
sea voyage gave him time and material for reflection, and after this he
was led from one subject to another until he obtained a grasp of nature
as a whole second only to that of Darwin.
Huxley was born in 1825. Like Goethe, he inherited from his mother his
brilliantly alert powers of thought, and from his father his courage and
tenacity of purpose, a combination of qualities which especially fitted
him for the period in which he was to live. There is nothing striking
recorded about his boyhood as a naturalist. He preferred engineering but
was led into medicine.
At the close of his medical course he secured a navy medical post upon
the _Rattlesnake_. This brought with it, as to Darwin, the training of a
four years’ voyage to the South Seas off eastern Australia and west
Guinea—a more liberal education to a naturalist than any university
affords, even at the present day. This voyage began at twenty-one, and
he says of it:
But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunity afforded
for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline, to be
down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities, to
find out how extremely worth living life seemed to be when one woke
from a night’s rest on a soft plank, with the sky for a canopy and
cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast, and more
especially to learn to work for what I got for myself out of it. My
brother officers were as good as sailors ought to be and generally
are, but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my
pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in the pursuit of
the objects which my friends, the middies, christened “Buffons,” after
the title conspicuous on a volume of the “Suites à Buffon,” which
stood in a prominent place on my shelf in the chart room.
As the result of this voyage of four years numerous papers were sent
home to the Linnæan Society of London, but few were published; upon his
return his first great work, “Upon the Anatomy and Affinities of the
Medusæ,” was declined for publication by the Admiralty—a fortunate
circumstance, for it led to his quitting the navy for good and trusting
to his own resources. Upon publication, this memoir at once established
his scientific reputation at the early age of twenty-four, just as
Richard Owen had won his spurs by his “Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus.”
In 1852 Huxley’s preference as a biologist was to turn back to
physiology, which had become the favorite study of his medical course.
But his fate was to enter and become distinguished in a widely different
branch, which had as little attraction for him as for most students of
marine life, namely, palæontology. He says of his sudden change of base:
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
Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former
point-blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir
Henry that I did not care for fossils and that I should give up
natural history as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I
held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has
been palæontological.
From this time until 1885 his labors extended over the widest field of
biology and of philosophy ever covered by any naturalist, with the
single exception of Aristotle. In philosophy Huxley showed rare critical
and historical power; he made the most exhaustive study of Hume, but his
own philosophical spirit and temper were more directly the offspring of
Descartes. Some subjects he mastered, others he merely touched, but
every subject which he wrote about he illuminated. Huxley did not
discover or first define protoplasm, but he made it known to the
English-speaking world as the physical basis of life, recognizing the
unity of animal and plant protoplasm. He cleared up certain problems
among the Protozoa. In 1849 appeared his great work upon the oceanic
Hydrozoa, and familiarity with these forms doubtless suggested the
brilliant comparison of the two-layered gastrula to the adult Hydrozoa.
He threw light upon the Tunicata, describing the endostyle as a
universal feature, but not venturing to raise the Tunicata to a separate
order. He set in order the cephalopod mollusca, deriving the spiral from
the straight-shelled fossil forms. He contributed to the Arthropoda; his
last word upon this group being his charming little volume upon the
“Crayfish,” a model of its kind. But think of the virgin field which
opened up before him among the vertebrata, when in 1859 he was the first
to perceive the truth of Darwin’s theory of descent! Here were Cuvier’s
and Owen’s vast researches upon living and extinct forms, a disorderly
chaos of facts waiting for generalization. Huxley was the man for the
time. He had already secured a thoroughly philosophical basis for his
comparative osteology by studying the new embryology of Von Baer, which
Richard Owen had wholly ignored. In 1858 his famous Croonian lecture on
the “Theory of the Vertebrate Skull” gave the death-blow to Owen’s
life-work upon the skull and vertebral archetype and to the whole system
of mystical and transcendental anatomy; and now Huxley set to work
vigorously to build out of Owen’s scattered tribes the great limbs and
branches of the vertebrate tree. He set the fishes and batrachia apart
as the _Icthyopsidan_ branch, the reptiles and birds as the
_Sauropsidan_ in contrast with the _Mammalian_, which he derived from a
prosauropsidan or amphibian stem, a theory which with some modification
has received strong recent verification.
Professor Owen, who had held undisputed sway in England up to 1858,
fought nobly for opinions which had been idolized in the first
half-century, but was routed at every point. Huxley captured his last
fortress when, in his famous essay of 1865, “Man’s Place in Nature,” he
undermined Owen’s teaching of the separate and distinct anatomical
position of man. We can only appreciate Huxley’s fighting qualities when
we see how strongly Owen was intrenched at the beginning of this long
battle royal; he was director of the British Museum and occupied other
high posts; he had the strong moral support of the government and of the
royal family, although these were weak allies in a scientific encounter.
Huxley’s powers of rapid generalization, of course, betrayed him
frequently; his Bathybius was a groundless and short-lived hypothesis;
he went far astray in the phylogeny of the horses. But these and other
errors were far less attributable to defects in his reasoning powers
than to the extraordinarily high pressure under which he worked for the
twenty years between 1860 and 1880, when duties upon the Educational
Board, upon the Government Fisheries Commission, and upon Parliamentary
committees crowded upon him. He had at his command none of the resources
of modern technique. He cut his own sections. I remember once seeing
some of his microscopic sections. To one of our college junior students
working with a Minot microtome Huxley’s sections would have appeared
like translucent beefsteaks—another illustration that it is not always
the section which reveals the natural law, but the man who looks at the
section.
Huxley was a master not only in the search for truth but in the way in
which he presented it, both in writing and in speaking. And we are
assured, largely as he was gifted by nature, his beautifully lucid and
interesting style was partly the result of deliberate hard work. He was
not born to it; some of his early essays are rather labored; he acquired
it. He was familiar with the best Greek literature and restudied the
language; he pored over Milton and Carlyle and Mill; he studied the fine
old English of the Bible; he took as especial models Hume and Hobbes,
until finally he wrote his mother tongue as no other Englishman wrote
it. Take up any one of his essays, biological, literary, philosophical,
you at once see his central idea and his main purpose, although he never
uses italics or spaced letters, as many of our German masters do to
relieve the obscurity of their sentences. We are carried along upon the
broad current of his reasoning without being confused by his abundant
side illustrations. He gleaned from the literature of all time until his
mind was stocked with apt similes. Who but Huxley would have selected
the title “Lay Sermons” for his first volume of addresses; or, in 1880,
twenty-one years after Darwin’s work appeared, would have entitled his
essay upon the influence of this work “The Coming of Age of the Origin
of Species”? Or to whom else would it have occurred to repeat over the
grave of Balfour the exquisitely appropriate lines: “For Lycidas is
dead, dead ere his prime”? Who else could have inveighed thus against
modern specialization:
We are in the case of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of the Roman
citadel to the Sabines and was crushed by the weight of the reward
bestowed upon her. It has become impossible for any man to keep pace
with the progress of the whole of any important branch of science. It
looks as if the scientific, like other revolutions, meant to devour
its own children; as if the growth of science tended to overwhelm its
votaries; as if the man of science of the future were condemned to
diminish into a narrow specialist as time goes on. It appears to me
that the only defense against this tendency to the degeneration of
scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of
scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of culture
without superficiality; and, on the other hand, depth and precision of
knowledge without narrowness.
What Haeckel did for evolution in Germany, Huxley did in England. As the
earliest and most ardent supporter of Darwin and the theory of descent,
it is remarkable that he never gave an unreserved support to the theory
of natural selection as all-sufficient. Twenty-five years ago, with his
usual penetration and prophetic insight, he showed that the problem of
variation might, after all, be the greater problem; and only three years
ago, in his Romanes Lecture, he disappointed many of the disciples of
Darwin by declaring that natural selection failed to explain the origin
of our moral and ethical nature. Whether he was right or wrong we will
not stop to discuss, but consider the still more remarkable conditions
of Huxley’s relations to the theory of evolution. As expositor, teacher,
defender, he was the high priest of evolution. From the first he saw the
strong and weak points of the special Darwinian theory; he wrote upon
the subject for thirty years, and yet he never contributed a single
original or novel idea to it; in other words, Huxley added vastly to the
demonstration, but never added to the sum of either theory or working
hypothesis, and the contemporary history of the theory proper could be
written without mentioning his name. This lack of speculation upon the
factors of evolution was true throughout his whole life; in the voyage
of the _Rattlesnake_, he says, he did not even think of the species
problem. His last utterance regarding the causes of evolution appeared
in one of the reviews as a passing criticism of Weismann’s finished
philosophy, in which he implies that his own philosophy of the causes of
evolution was as far off as ever; in other words, Huxley never fully
made up his mind or committed himself to any causal theory of
development.
Taking the nineteenth century at large, outside of our own circles of
biology Huxley’s greatest and most permanent achievement was his victory
for free thought. Personally we may not be agnostic; we may disagree
with much that he has said and written, but we must admire Huxley’s
valiant services none the less. A reformer must be an extremist, and
Huxley was often extreme, but he never said what he did not believe to
be true. If it is easy for you and for me to say what we think, in print
and out of print now, it is because of the battles fought by such men as
Huxley and Haeckel. When Huxley began his great crusade the air was full
of religious intolerance, and, what is quite as bad, scientific shams.
If Huxley had entered the contest carefully and guardedly, he would have
been lost in the enemies’ ranks, but he struck right and left with
sledge-hammer blows, whether it was a high dignitary of the church or of
the state. Just before the occasion of one of his greatest contests,
that with Gladstone in the pages of _The Contemporary Review_, Huxley
was in Switzerland, completely broken down in health and suffering from
torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had written one of his
characteristically brilliant articles upon the close correspondence
between the Order of Creation as revealed in the first chapter of
Genesis and the Order of Evolution as shown by modern biology. “When
this article reached me,” Huxley told me, “I read it through and it made
me so angry that I believe it must have acted upon my liver. At all
events, when I finished my reply to Gladstone I felt better than I had
for months past.”
Huxley’s last public appearance was at the meeting of the British
Association at Oxford in 1894. He had been very urgently invited to
attend, for, about a third of a century before, the association had met
at Oxford and Huxley had had his famous encounter with Bishop
Wilberforce. It was felt that the anniversary would be a historic one
and incomplete without his presence, and so it proved to be. Huxley’s
especial duty was to second the vote of thanks for the Marquis of
Salisbury’s address, one of the invariable formalities of the opening
meeting of the association. The meeting proved to be the greatest one in
the history of the association. The Sheldonian Theatre was packed with
one of the most distinguished scientific audiences ever brought
together, and the address of the Marquis was worthy of the occasion. The
whole tenor of it was the unknown in science. Passing from the unsolved
problems of astronomy, chemistry and physics, he came to biology. With
delicate irony he spoke of the “_comforting word, evolution_,” and
passing to the Weismannian controversy implied that the diametrically
opposed views so frequently expressed nowadays threw the whole process
of evolution into doubt. It was only too evident that the Marquis
himself found no comfort in evolution and even entertained a suspicion
as to its probability. It was well worth the whole journey to Oxford to
watch Huxley during this portion of the address. In his red
doctor-of-laws gown, placed upon his shoulders by the very body of men
who had once referred to him as “a Mr. Huxley,” he sank deeper into his
chair upon the very front of the platform and restlessly tapped his
foot. His situation was an unenviable one. He had to thank an ex-Prime
Minister of England and present Chancellor of Oxford University for an
address the sentiments of which were directly against those he himself
had been maintaining for twenty-five years. He said afterward that when
the proofs of the Marquis’s address were put in his hands the day
before, he realized that he had before him a most delicate and difficult
task.
Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thompson), one of the most distinguished living
physicists, first moved the vote of thanks, but his reception was
nothing to the tremendous applause which greeted Huxley in the heart of
that university whose traditional principles he had so long been
opposing. Considerable anxiety had been felt by his friends lest his
voice would fail to fill the theatre, for it had signally failed during
the Romanes Lecture delivered in Oxford the year before, but when Huxley
arose he reminded one of a venerable gladiator returning to the arena
after years of absence. He raised his figure and his voice to full
height, and, with one foot turned over the edge of the step, veiled an
unmistakable and vigorous protest in the most gracious and dignified
speech of thanks.
Throughout the subsequent special sessions of this meeting Huxley could
not appear. He gave the impression of being aged, if not infirm, but no
one realized that he had spoken his last word as champion of the law of
evolution. He soon returned to Eastbourne. Early in the winter he
contracted the grippe, which passed into pneumonia. He rallied once or
twice, and his last effort to complete a reply to Balfour’s “Foundations
of Belief” hastened his death, which came upon June 29, 1895, at the age
of seventy.
I have endeavored to show in how many ways Huxley was a model for us of
the younger generation. In the central hall of the British Museum of
Natural History sits in marble the life-size figure of Charles Darwin;
upon his right will soon be placed a beautiful statue of Richard Owen,
and I know that there are many who will enjoy taking some share in the
movement to complete this group with the noble figure of Thomas Henry
Huxley.
_The above Memorial was delivered before the New York Academy of
Sciences November 11, 1895. It was then revised and delivered as “A
Student’s Reminiscences of Huxley” to the assembly of students at the
Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. As printed
in this form it was sent to Leonard Huxley, who wrote the following
letter of acknowledgment_:
CHARTERHOUSE
GODALMING
12 July 1897