It is because Huxley himself was endowed with the enthusiasm for truth and the fanaticism of veracity, because he was never carried away by any exuberance of verbosity, because he was ready to stand cross-examination on every statement he made, because he was sincere and straightforward, that he became a master of style. Of course, his mastery is due also to his untiring effort to achieve directness and simplicity, to his wide reading which was continually enriching his vocabulary, and to his diligent study of the great writers, not of our language only but of French also, and Latin and Greek.

As a result of his immense experience as a teacher he learned how to put together an address so that it could most easily be apprehended by his hearers. He bestowed upon his lectures a logical structure, which sustained them throughout. He proceeded from the beginning to the middle and from the middle to the end, by regular steps, so that all who listened to him could follow his progress without undue effort. He never "wrote down" to the level of an uneducated audience, but he so deftly prepared his presentation of unfamiliar facts and unexpected conclusions that his uneducated audience had no difficulty in taking in his meaning as he unfolded it. He addressed them not from the remote and austere elevation of the scholar, but familiarly and in friendly fashion, as ordinary men speak to one another when they have matters of importance to communicate.

In his desire to make himself clear, and so to shape what he had to impart that it should be easy to under

stand, he was greatly aided by his training as an anatomist, which had taught him the prime importance of the skeleton, with all its bones, each in its proper place, ready to support the muscles and the nerves. He bestowed this buttressed framework on all his addresses and on all his articles; but he always clothed it with flesh and blood, so that it was ever present, although it was never paraded. This is one reason why his lectures and his papers on varied subjects are worthier of detailed study than essays by writers of a more obvious brilliance, who are not infrequently careless of construction and who are occasionally inclined to pay less attention to what they have to say than to the way in which they are going to say it.

This praise of Huxley's style must not be taken to imply that he was a faultless writer, always impeccable in his use of words. Unfortunately this is not the case; and he was not free from petty departures from absolute correctness of usage-more often in his letters than in his lectures, but even in these now and again. He was guilty of using like for as and of writing (in a letter to Darwin) "like the Yankees do." He spoke of "a papyrus which neither Brugsch nor Maspero have yet got hold of." He employed the familiar Briticism, directly for as soon as, i.e., "directly I arrived." He said "those kind of people." And he referred to “Men, who like you and I, stand.” But these slight errors, while they are regrettable, and while they are blemishes on his record as a man of letters, were, after all, only a few. Absolute accuracy in writing is like liberty; it demands eternal vigilance. Huxley's trivial inaccuracies never interfered with the logic of his structure or with the vigor of his statement.

II

No one can read the addresses and essays included in the present volume without recognizing that Huxley was a towering example of a man who had been well educated. Yet when we search his autobiography for information about his schooling we discover to our surprise that he was practically self-taught. He has told us that his "regular school training was of the briefest" and that the teachers in the school he attended cared nothing for the "intellectual and moral welfare" of their pupils. However ill-prepared he might have been, he began the study of medicine when he was only fifteen, not in a well-organized and well-equipped medical school, but as a pupilassistant to a brother-in-law, who was a practicing physician. When he was only seventeen he won a free scholarship at the Charing Cross Hospital and Medical School; and his application for admission declared that he had a fair knowledge of Latin, read French with facility, and knew something of German. When he was twenty he won a gold medal for anatomy and physiology, and received the degree of Bachelor of Medicine.

How had he acquired his Latin, his French, and his German? How had he trained himself so that he was able to surpass his competitors in his knowledge of anatomy and physiology? "I worked extremely hard when it pleased me," so he states in his early account of his youth, "and when it did not—which was a very frequent case I was extremely idle. . . . I read everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all

sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as speedily." This confession calls for two comments; the first is that Huxley, in his old age, probably underestimated the hard work that he did as a youth and overestimated the idleness indulged in; and the second is that what he termed idleness-that is, abstention from his allotted tasks to devote his time to a wide range of reading, was probably profitable to him in that it opened his eyes to the immense variety of human experience and to the insufficiency of human knowledge. Then at the Charing Cross Hospital he had the great good fortune to come under the influence of a born teacher. Impressed by the extent and precision of this lecturer's knowledge and liking "the severe exactness of his method of lecturing," Huxley worked hard to obtain his approbation.

Thus we see that Huxley had early acquired the habit of hard work; that he was stimulated by an inspiring instructor; and that he was, all unconsciously, fitting himself for his life-work. Then when he was only twentyone he was appointed an assistant surgeon in the navy and assigned to the Rattlesnake, which set sail for the South Seas and on which Huxley was to spend four years in exploration and investigation. In this protracted voyage his habit of hard work, his insatiable curiosity about life, and his indomitable energy worked in combination so effectively that the young fellow who boarded the Rattlesnake possessing only the elementary instruction needed by an assistant surgeon, returned to England a thoroughly well-trained naturalist, an acute observer whose awakened imagination enabled him to interpret the result of his laborious observations.

Somehow in those four years of exile he had taught himself how to be independent, how to stand on his own feet, how to do his own thinking, and how to pierce through the skin of a problem to the heart of it. He had discovered that he must never be overawed by authority and that he had a right to inspect the evidence alleged in support of any theory. He had learned to reject all generalization not solidly rooted in the conscientious investigation of every available fact. “If any one tells me, 'it stands to reason' that such things must happen," so he wrote later in life, "I generally find reason to doubt the safety of his standing."

This scientific integrity is exhibited in all his reports on his researches and in all his essays and addresses. And these latter papers reveal a breadth of outlook beyond the borders of science—a largeness of vision due to his retention all his life of his boyhood habit of reading every book he could lay hands on. His son has told us that Huxley "possessed a wonderful faculty for tearing out the heart of a book, reading it through at a gallop, but knowing what it said on all the points that interested him." He grasped at once "the substance of what an author had written; how it fitted into his own scheme of knowledge; and where to find any point again when he wished to cite it." The results of this incessant perusal of all sorts of books in half-a-dozen different languages, modern and ancient―he learned Greek in middle life mainly that he might assure himself as to the exact meaning of a statement of Aristotle's-these results are abundantly evident in Huxley's works. Bacon has told us that "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing