Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt:...a knot of young men in the audience, hearty but seeming scant through the fewness of those who gave it, and almost angrily resented by some, welcomed the first point made. Then as, slowly and measuredly at first, more quickly and with more vigour later, stroke followed stroke, the circle of cheers grew wider and yet wider, until the speaker's last words were crowned with an applause falling not far short of, indeed equalling, that which had gone before, an applause hearty and genuine in its recognition that a strong man had arisen among the biologists of England. The second scene, that of 1894, is still fresh in the minds of all. No one who was present is likely to forget how, when Huxley rose to second the vote of thanks for the presidential address, the whole house burst into a cheering such as had never before been witnessed on any like occasion, a cheering which said, as plainly as such things can say: "This is the faithful servant who has laboured for more than half a century on behalf of science with his face set firmly towards truth, and we want him to know that his labours have not been in vain." Nor is any one likely to forget the few carefully chosen, wise, pregnant words which fell from him when the applause died away. Those two speeches, the one long and polemical, the other brief and judicial, show, taken together, many of the qualities which made Huxley great and strong. Among those qualities perhaps the most dominant, certainly the most effective as regards his influence on the world, were on the one hand an alertness, a quickness of apprehension, and a clear way of thinking, which, in dealing with a problem, made him dissatisfied with any solution incapable of rigid proof and incisive expression, he seemed always...