The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 2

The Life and Letters of Thomas
Henry Huxley, vol 2

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Henry Huxley
Volume 2, by Leonard Huxley #2 in our series by Leonard Huxley
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Title: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2
Author: Leonard Huxley
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5226] [Yes, we are more than one

year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 8, 2002]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK T.H.
HUXLEY VOLUME 2 ***

Produced by Sue Asscher [email protected]

LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
BY HIS SON
LEONARD HUXLEY.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOLUME 2.
(PLATE: T.H. HUXLEY, PHOTOGRAPH BY WALKER AND
COCKERILL, PH. SC. SIGNED T.H. HUXLEY, 1857.)

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 2.
1. 1870.

CHAPTER 2.
2. 1871.

CHAPTER 2.
3. 1872.

CHAPTER 2.
4. 1873.

CHAPTER 2.
5. 1874.

CHAPTER 2.
6. 1875-1876.

CHAPTER 2.
7. 1875-1876.

CHAPTER 2.
8. 1876.

CHAPTER 2.
9. 1877.

CHAPTER 2.
10. 1878.

CHAPTER 2.
11. 1879.

CHAPTER 2.
12. 1881.

CHAPTER 2.
13. 1882.

CHAPTER 2.
14. 1883.

CHAPTER 2.
15. 1884.

CHAPTER 2.
16. 1884-1885.

CHAPTER 2.
17. 1885.

CHAPTER 2.
18. 1886.

CHAPTER 2.
19. 1886.

CHAPTER 2.
1. 1870.
[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.
From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years
of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had
been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by his

personal energy and power. When at length settled in the professorship
at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself more than a
beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the field of
knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred subjects in order
to know the true bearings of his own little portion, that he treated the
next six years simply as years of further apprenticeship. Under the
suggestive power of the "Origin of Species" all these scattered studies
fell suddenly into due rank and order; the philosophic unity he had so
long been seeking inspired his thought with tenfold vigour, and the
battle at Oxford in defence of the new hypothesis first brought him
before the public eye as one who not only had the courage of his
convictions when attacked, but could, and more, would, carry the war
effectively into the enemy's country. And for the next ten years he was
commonly identified with the championship of the most unpopular
view of the time; a fighter, an assailant of long-established fallacies, he
was too often considered a mere iconoclast, a subverter of every other
well-rooted institution, theological, educational, or moral.
It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in the
average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies. His
name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual gravity
beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held
"without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by
W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism,
materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in token
of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of the
Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by the
statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."
But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came
forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform, seeking
not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show, in theory
and practice, how scientific training might be introduced into the
general system of education. He was more than once asked to stand for
Parliament, but refused,