Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 46

In his reply, Huxley writes:--]

To J. Tyndall.

Thanks also for a copy of the "Dundee Advertiser" containing your lecture. It seemed to me that the report must be a very good one, and the lecture reads exceedingly well. You have inaugurated the working men's lectures of the a.s.sociation in a way that cannot be improved. And it was worth the trouble, for I suspect they will become a great and n.o.ble feature in the meetings.

Everything seems to have gone well at the meeting, the educational business carried [i.e. a recommendation that natural science be made a part of the curriculum in the public schools], and the anthropologers making fools of themselves in a most effectual way. So that I do not feel that I have anything to reproach myself with for being absent.

I am very pleased to hear of the reconciliation with Thomson and Tait.

The mode of it speaks well for them, and the fact will remove a certain source of friction from amongst the cogs of your mental machinery.

[The following gives the reason for his resigning the Fullerian lectures.h.i.+p:--]

Athenaeum Club, May, 1867.

My dear Tyndall,

A conversation I had with Bence Jones yesterday reminded me that I ought to have communicated with you. But we do not meet so often as we used to do, being, I suppose, both very busy, and I forget to write.

You recollect that the last time we talked together, you mentioned a notion of Bence Jones's to make the Fullerian Professors.h.i.+p of Physiology a practically permanent appointment, and that I was quite inclined to stick by that (if such arrangement could be carried out), and give up other things.

But since I have been engaged in the present course of lectures I have found reason to change my views. It is very hard work, and takes up every atom of my time to make the lectures what they should be; and I find that at this time of year, being more or less used up, I suppose, with the winter work, I stand the worry and excitement of the actual lectures very badly. Add to this that it is six weeks clean gone out of the only time I have disposable for real scientific progress, and you will understand how it is that I have made up my mind to resign.

I put all this clearly before Bence Jones yesterday, with the proviso that I could and would do nothing that should embarra.s.s the Inst.i.tution or himself.

If there is the least difficulty in supplying my place, or if the managers think I shall deal shadily with them by resigning before the expiration of my term, of course I go on. And I hope you all understand that I would do anything rather than put even the appearance of a slight upon those who were kind enough to elect me.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[He found a subst.i.tute for 1868, the last year of the triennial course, in Dr. (now Sir) Michael Foster. Of his final lectures in 1867 he used to tell a story against himself.]

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 the skull?" ("Reminiscences of T.H.

Huxley" by Professor H. Fairfield Osborn).

[Dr. Foster used to add maliciously, that disgust at the small impression he seemed to have made was the true reason for the transference of the lectures.]

CHAPTER 1.22.

1868.

[In 1868 he published five scientific memoirs, amongst them his cla.s.sification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica"

("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years'

labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution, on February 7, "On the Animals which are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles."

Of this branch of work Sir M. Foster says: (Obituary Notice "Proceedings of the Royal Society" volume 59):--

One great consequence of these researches was that science was enriched by a clear demonstration of the many and close affinities between reptiles and birds, so that the two henceforward came to be known under the joint t.i.tle of Sauropsida, the amphibia being at the same time distinctly more separated from the reptiles, and their relations to fishes more clearly signified by the joint t.i.tle of Ichthyopsida. At the same time, proof was brought forward that the line of descent of the Sauropsida clearly diverged from that of the Mammalia, both starting from some common ancestry. And besides this great generalisation, the importance of which, both from a cla.s.sificatory and from an evolutional point of view, needs no comment, there came out of the same researches numerous lesser contributions to the advancement of morphological knowledge, including among others an attempt, in many respects successful, at a cla.s.sification of birds.

This work in connection with the reptilian ancestry of birds further appears in the paleontological papers published in 1869 upon the Dinosaurs (see Chapter 23), and is referred to in a letter to Haeckel.

His Hunterian lectures on the Invertebrata appeared this year in the "Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science" (pages 126-129, and 191-201), and in the October number of the same journal appeared his famous article "On some Organisms living at great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean," originally delivered before the British a.s.sociation at Norwich in this year (1868). The sticky or viscid character of the fresh mud from the bottom of the Atlantic had already been noticed by Captain Dayman when making soundings for the Atlantic cable. This stickiness was apparently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent, gelatinous substance, consisting of minute granules without discoverable nucleus or membranous envelope, and interspersed with cretaceous coccoliths. After a description of the structure of this substance and its chemical reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding the statement of fact in the description and the interpretation which he proceeds to put upon these facts:--]

I conceive that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent ma.s.ses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterise the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Ur-schleim," which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his "Monographie der Moneras" page 210. [(See "Collected Essays" 5 153.)

Of this he writes to Haeckel on October 6, 1868:--]

This paper] is about a new "Moner" which lies at the bottom of the Atlantic to all appearances, and gives rise to some wonderful calcified bodies. I have christened it Bathybius Haeckelii, and I hope that you will not be ashamed of your G.o.d-child. I will send you some of the mud with the paper.

[The explanation was plausible enough on general grounds, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But it must be noted that the specimens examined by him and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen in a preserved state. Neither of them saw a fresh specimen, though on the cruise of the "Porcupine," Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W. Carpenter examined the substance in a fresh state, and found no better explanation to give of it. However, not only were the expectations that it was very widely distributed over the Atlantic bottom, falsified in 1879 by the researches of the "Challenger" expedition, but the behaviour of certain deep-sea specimens gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before as genuine deep-sea mud, was a precipitate due to the action on the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved.

Though Haeckel, with his special experience of Monera, refused to desert Bathybius, a close parallel to which was found off Greenland in 1876, the rest of its sponsors gave it up. Whatever it might be as a matter of possibility, the particular evidence upon which it had been described was tainted. Once a.s.sured of this, Huxley characteristically took the bull by the horns. Without waiting for any one else to come forward, he made public renunciation of Bathybius at the British a.s.sociation in 1879. The "eating of the leek" as recommended to his friend Dohrn (July 7, 1868), was not merely a counsel for others, but was a prescription followed by himself on occasion:--]

As you know, I did not think you were on the right track with the Arthropoda, and I am not going to profess to be sorry that you have finally worked yourself to that conclusion.

As to the unlucky publication in the "Journal of Anatomy and Physiology," you have read your Shakespeare and know what is meant by "eating a leek." Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I a.s.sure you that if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly in people of sanguine temperament.

Seriously you must not mind a check of this kind.

[This incident, one may suspect, was in his mind when he wrote in his "Autobiography" of the rapidity of thought characteristic of his mother:--]

That characteristic has been pa.s.sed 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.

[At the Norwich meeting of the a.s.sociation he also delivered his well-known lecture to working men "On a Piece of Chalk," a perfect example of the handling of a common and trivial subject, so as to make it] "a window into the Infinite." [He was particularly interested in the success of the meeting, as his friend Hooker was President, and writes to Darwin, September 12:--]

We had a capital meeting at Norwich, and dear old Hooker came out in great force as he always does in emergencies.

The only fault was the terrible "Darwinismus" which spread over the section and crept out when you least expected it, even in Fergusson's lecture on "Buddhist Temples."

You will have the rare happiness to see your ideas triumphant during your lifetime.

P.S.--I am preparing to go into opposition; I can't stand it.

[This lecture "On a Piece of Chalk," together with two others delivered this year, seem to me to mark the maturing of his style into that mastery of clear expression for which he deliberately laboured, the saying exactly what he meant, neither too much nor too little, without confusion and without obscurity. Have something to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which has to be said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each word. 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. In no one could Buffon's aphorism on style find a better ill.u.s.tration, "Le style c'est l'homme meme." In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific habit of mind; for showing that truthfulness need not be bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. Years after, no less an authority than Spedding, in a letter upon the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exact.i.tude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, a.s.serted that, if as a young man he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced the same effect upon him.

Of the other two discourses referred to, one is the opening address which he delivered as Princ.i.p.al at the South London Working Men's College on January 4, "A Liberal Education, and Where to Find It." This is not a brief for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay has insisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education, whether it be cla.s.sical or scientific; but it urged the necessity for a strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern conception of the world, created by the spread of natural knowledge, is to be fairly understood. If culture is the "criticism of life," it is fallacious if deprived of knowledge of the most important factor which has transformed the medieval into the modern spirit.

Two of his most striking pa.s.sages are to be found in this address; one the simile of the force behind nature as the hidden chess player; the other the n.o.ble description of the end of a true education.

Well known as it is, I venture to quote the latter as an instance of his style:--]

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose pa.s.sions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.

[The third of these discourses is the address "On the Physical Basis of Life," of which he writes to Haeckel on January 20, 1869:--]