Autobiography of Thomas Henry Huxley

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Autobiography of Thomas Henry Huxley

**

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SELECTED ESSAYS

by

Thomas Henry Huxley



     Note: The notes at the end of the book were originally
     referenced by page number. I have instead inserted numbers
     within the text in the format [xx] and cross-referenced
     these to the appropriate notes.--D.L.





Edited, with introduction and notes by Ada L. F. Snell Associate
Professor Of English Mount Holyoke College

Riverside College Classics Copyright 1909



CONTENTS


PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

The Life of Huxley

Subject-matter, Structure, and Style of Essays

Suggested Studies

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

ON A PIECE OF CHALK

THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION

THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE

ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS

NOTES




PREFACE


The purpose of the following selections is to present to students
of English a few of Huxley's representative essays. Some of these
selections are complete; others are extracts. In the latter case,
however, they are not extracts in the sense of being incomplete wholes,
for each selection given will be found to have, in Aristotle's
phrase, "a beginning, a middle, and an end." That they are complete in
themselves, although only parts of whole essays, is due to the fact that
Huxley, in order to make succeeding material clear, often prepares
the way with a long and careful definition. Such is the nature of the
extract A Liberal Education, in reality a definition to make distinct
and forcible his ideas on the shortcomings of English schools. Such a
definition, also, is The Method of Scientific Investigation.

The footnotes are those of the author. Other notes on the text have been
included for the benefit of schools inadequately equipped with reference
books. It is hoped, however, that the notes may be found not to be so
numerous as to prevent the training of the student in a self-reliant and
scholarly use of dictionaries and reference books; it is hoped, also,
that they may serve to stimulate him to trace out for himself more
completely any subject connected with the text in which he may feel a
peculiar interest. It should be recognized that notes are of value only
as they develop power to read intelligently. If unintelligently relied
upon, they may even foster indifference and lazy mental habits.

I wish to express my obligation to Miss Flora Bridges, whose careful
reading of the manuscript has been most helpful, and to Professor Clara
F. Stevens, the head of the English Department at Mount Holyoke College,
whose very practical aid made this volume possible.

A. L. F. S.




INTRODUCTION




I -- THE LIFE OF HUXLEY


Of Huxley's life and of the forces which moulded his thought, the
Autobiography gives some account; but many facts which are significant
are slighted, and necessarily the later events of his life are omitted.
To supplement the story as given by him is the purpose of this sketch.
The facts for this account are gathered entirely from the Life and
Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son. For a real acquaintance
with Huxley, the student should consult this source for himself; he will
count the reading of the Life and Letters among the rare pleasures which
have come to him through books.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born on May 4, 1825. His autobiography gives a
full account of his parents, his early boyhood, and his education. Of
formal education, Huxley had little; but he had the richer schooling
which nature and life give an eager mind. He read widely; he talked
often with older people; he was always investigating the why of things.
He kept a journal in which he noted thoughts gathered from books, and
ideas on the causes of certain phenomena. In this journal he frequently
wrote what he had done and had set himself to do in the way of
increasing his knowledge. Self-conducted, also, was his later education
at the Charing Cross Hospital. Here, like Stevenson in his university
days, Huxley seemed to be idle, but in reality, he was always busy on
his own private end. So constantly did he work over the microscope that
the window at which he sat came to be dubbed by his fellow students "The
Sign of the Head and Microscope." Moreover, in his regular courses at
Charing Cross, he seems to have done work sufficiently notable to be
recognized by several prizes and a gold medal.

Of his life after the completion of his medical course, of his
search for work, of his appointment as assistant surgeon on board the
Rattlesnake, and of his scientific work during the four years' cruise,
Huxley gives a vivid description in the autobiography. As a result of
his investigations on this voyage, he published various essays which
quickly secured for him a position in the scientific world as a
naturalist of the first rank. A testimony of the value of this work was
his election to membership in the Royal Society.

Although Huxley had now, at the age of twenty-six, won distinction
in science, he soon discovered that it was not so easy to earn bread
thereby. Nevertheless, to earn a living was most important if he were to
accomplish the two objects which he had in view. He wished, in the first
place, to marry Miss Henrietta Heathorn of Sydney, to whom he had become
engaged when on the cruise with the Rattlesnake; his second object
was to follow science as a profession. The struggle to find something
connected with science which would pay was long and bitter; and only a
resolute determination to win kept Huxley from abandoning it altogether.
Uniform ill-luck met him everywhere. He has told in his autobiography
of his troubles with the Admiralty in the endeavor to get his papers
published, and of his failure there. He applied for a position to teach
science in Toronto; being unsuccessful in this attempt, he applied
successively for various professorships in the United Kingdom, and in
this he was likewise unsuccessful. Some of his friends urged him to hold
out, but others thought the fight an unequal one, and advised him to
emigrate to Australia. He himself was tempted to practice medicine in
Sydney; but to give up his purpose seemed to him like cowardice. On the
other hand, to prolong the struggle indefinitely when he might quickly
earn a living in other ways seemed like selfishness and an injustice to
the woman to whom he had been for a long time engaged. Miss Heathorn,
however, upheld him in his determination to pursue science; and his
sister also, he writes, cheered him by her advice and encouragement to
persist in the struggle. Something of the man's heroic temper may be
gathered from a letter which he wrote to Miss Heathorn when his affairs
were darkest. "However painful our separation may be," he says, "the
spectacle of a man who had given up the cherished purpose of his life
. . . would, before long years were over our heads, be infinitely more
painful." He declares that he is hemmed in by all sorts of difficulties.
"Nevertheless the path has shown itself a fair one, neither more
difficult nor less so than most paths in life in which a man of energy
may hope to do much if he believes in himself, and is at peace within."
Thus relieved in mind, he makes his decision in spite of adverse fate.
"My course of life is taken, I will not leave London--I WILL make myself
a name and a position as well as an income by some kind of pursuit
connected with science which is the thing for which Nature has fitted me
if she has ever fitted any one for anything."

But suddenly the long wait, the faith in self, were justified, and the
turning point came. "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that
one either weathers or wrecks one's self on," he writes to his sister.
"Thank God, I think I may say I have weathered mine--not without a good
deal of damage to spars and rigging though, for it blew deuced hard on
the other side." In 1854 a permanent lectureship was offered him at the
Government School of Mines; also, a lectureship at St. Thomas' Hospital;
and he was asked to give various other lecture courses. He thus found
himself able to establish the home for which he had waited eight years.
In July, 1855, he was married to Miss Heathorn.

The succeeding years from 1855 to 1860 were filled with various kinds
of work connected with science: original investigation, printing of
monographs, and establishing of natural history museums. His advice
concerning local museums is interesting and characteristically
expressed. "It [the local museum if properly arranged] will tell both
natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great
scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room
of clubs from New Zealand, Hindu idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys,
scorpions, and conch shells--who shall describe the weary inutility of
it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look
for objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want
to know is that their 'America is here,' as Wilhelm Meister has it."
During this period, also, he began his lectures to workingmen, calling
them Peoples' Lectures. "POPULAR lectures," he said, "I hold to be an
abomination unto the Lord." Working-men attended these lectures in great
numbers, and to them Huxley seemed to be always able to speak at his
best. His purpose in giving these lectures should be expressed in his
own words: "I want the working class to understand that Science and her
ways are great facts for them--that physical virtue is the base of all
other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest--not
because fellows in black and white ties tell them so, but because there
are plain and patent laws which they must obey 'under penalties.'"

Toward the close of 1859, Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published. It
raised a great outcry in England; and Huxley immediately came forward as
chief defender of the faith therein set forth. He took part in debates
on this subject, the most famous of which was the one between himself
and Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford. The Bishop concluded his speech
by turning to Huxley and asking, "Was it through his grandfather or
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?" Huxley, as is
reported by an eye-witness, "slowly and deliberately arose. A slight
tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and grave, he stood before us
and spoke those tremendous words. . . . He was not ashamed to have a
monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a
man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." Another story indicates
the temper of that time. Carlyle, whose writing had strongly influenced
Huxley, and whom Huxley had come to know, could not forgive him for his
attitude toward evolution. One day, years after the publication of Man's
Place in Nature, Huxley, seeing Carlyle on the other side of the street,
a broken, pathetic figure, walked over and spoke to him. The old man
merely remarked, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are
all descended from monkeys," and passed on. Huxley, however, saw nothing
degrading to man's dignity in the theory of evolution. In a wonderfully
fine sentence he gives his own estimate of the theory as it affects
man's future on earth. "Thoughtful men once escaped from the blinding
influences of traditional prejudices, will find in the lowly stock
whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendour of his
capacities; and will discover, in his long progress through the past, a
reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." As
a result of all these controversies on The Origin of Species and of
investigations to uphold Darwin's theory, Huxley wrote his first book,
already mentioned, Man's Place in Nature.

To read a list of the various kinds of work which Huxley was doing
from 1870 to 1875 is to be convinced of his abundant energy and many
interests. At about this time Huxley executed the plan which he had had
in mind for a long time, the establishment of laboratories for the
use of students. His object was to furnish a more exact preliminary
training. He complains that the student who enters the medical school
is "so habituated to learn only from books, or oral teaching, that the
attempt to learn from things and to get his knowledge at first hand is
something new and strange." To make this method of teaching successful
in the schools, Huxley gave practical instruction in laboratory work to
school-masters.

"If I am to be remembered at all," Huxley once wrote, "I would rather it
should be as a man who did his best to help the people than by any
other title." Certainly as much of his time as could be spared from his
regular work was given to help others. His lectures to workingmen and
school-masters have already been mentioned. In addition, he lectured to
women on physiology and to children on elementary science. In order
to be of greater service to the children, Huxley, in spite of delicate
health, became a member of the London School Board. His immediate object
was "to temper book-learning with something of the direct knowledge of
Nature." His other purposes were to secure a better physical training
for children and to give them a clearer understanding of social and
moral law. He did not believe, on the one hand, in overcrowding the
curriculum, but, on the other hand, he "felt that all education should
be thrown open to all that each man might know to what state in life he
was called." Another statement of his purpose and beliefs is given by
Professor Gladstone, who says of his work on the board: "He resented
the idea that schools were to train either congregations for churches or
hands for factories. He was on the Board as a friend of children. What
he sought to do for the child was for the child's sake, that it might
live a fuller, truer, worthier life."

The immense amount of work which Huxley did in these years told very
seriously on his naturally weak constitution. It became necessary for
him finally for two successive years to stop work altogether. In 1872
he went to the Mediterranean and to Egypt. This was a holiday full of
interest for a man like Huxley who looked upon the history of the world
and man's place in the world with a keen scientific mind. Added to this
scientific bent of mind, moreover, Huxley had a deep appreciation for
the picturesque in nature and life. Bits of description indicate
his enjoyment in this vacation. He writes of his entrance to the
Mediterranean, "It was a lovely morning, and nothing could be grander
than Ape Hill on one side and the Rock on the other, looking like great
lions or sphinxes on each side of a gateway." In Cairo, Huxley found
much to interest him in archaeology, geology, and the every-day life of
the streets. At the end of a month, he writes that he is very well and
very grateful to Old Nile for all that he has done for him, not the
least "for a whole universe of new thoughts and pictures of life." The
trip, however, did no lasting good. In 1873 Huxley was again very ill,
but was under such heavy costs at this time that another vacation was
impossible. At this moment, a critical one in his life, some of his
close scientific friends placed to his credit twenty-one hundred pounds
to enable him to take the much needed rest. Darwin wrote to Huxley
concerning the gift: "In doing this we are convinced that we act for the
public interest." He assured Huxley that the friends who gave this felt
toward him as a brother. "I am sure that you will return this feeling
and will therefore be glad to give us the opportunity of aiding you in
some degree, as this will be a happiness to us to the last day of
our lives." The gift made it possible for Huxley to take another long
vacation, part of which was spent with Sir Joseph Hooker, a noted
English botanist, visiting the volcanoes of Auvergne. After this trip
he steadily improved in health, with no other serious illness for ten
years.

In 1876 Huxley was invited to visit America and to deliver the inaugural
address at Johns Hopkins University. In July of this year accordingly,
in company with his wife, he crossed to New York. Everywhere Huxley
was received with enthusiasm, for his name was a very familiar one. Two
quotations from his address at Johns Hopkins are especially worthy of
attention as a part of his message to Americans. "It has been my fate to
see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the
petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work them.
A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace.
Trustees have sometimes made a palace and called it a university."

The second quotation is as follows:--

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness
or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, territory
does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true
sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to
do with all these things? . . .

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth
and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot
give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in
whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities
ought to be, and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the
nation.


After the return from America, the same innumerable occupations were
continued. It would be impossible in short space even to enumerate all
Huxley's various publications of the next ten years. His work, however,
changed gradually from scientific investigation to administrative
work, not the least important of which was the office of Inspector of
Fisheries. A second important office was the Presidency of the Royal
Society. Of the work of this society Sir Joseph Hooker writes: "The
duties of the office are manifold and heavy; they include attendance at
all the meetings of the Fellows, and of the councils, committees, and
sub-committees of the Society, and especially the supervision of the
printing and illustrating all papers on biological subjects that are
published in the Society's Transactions and Proceedings; the latter
often involving a protracted correspondence with the authors. To this
must be added a share in the supervision of the staff officers, of the
library and correspondence, and the details of house-keeping." All the
work connected with this and many other offices bespeaks a life too
hard-driven and accounts fully for the continued ill-health which
finally resulted in a complete break-down.

Huxley had always advocated that the age of sixty was the time for
"official death," and had looked forward to a peaceful "Indian summer."
With this object in mind and troubled by increasing ill-health, he began
in 1885 to give up his work. But to live even in comparative idleness,
after so many years of activity, was difficult. "I am sure," he says,
"that the habit of incessant work into which we all drift is as bad
in its way as dram-drinking. In time you cannot be comfortable without
stimulus." But continued bodily weakness told upon him to the extent
that all work became distasteful. An utter weariness with frequent
spells of the blues took possession of him; and the story of his life
for some years is the story of the long pursuit of health in England,
Switzerland, and especially in Italy.

Although Huxley was wretchedly ill during this period, he wrote letters
which are good to read for their humor and for their pictures of foreign
cities. Rome he writes of as an idle, afternoony sort of place from
which it is difficult to depart. He worked as eagerly over the historic
remains in Rome as he would over a collection of geological specimens.
"I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well and I am quite learned in
the Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of
which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church." Florence,
for a man with a conscience and ill-health, had too many picture
galleries. "They are a sore burden to the conscience if you don't go
to see them, and an awful trial to the back and legs if you do," he
complained. He found Florence, nevertheless, a lovely place and full
of most interesting things to see and do. His letters with reference to
himself also are vigorously and entertainingly expressed. He writes in
a characteristic way of his growing difficulty with his hearing. "It
irritates me not to hear; it irritates me still more to be spoken to as
if I were deaf, and the absurdity of being irritated on the last ground
irritates me still more." And again he writes in a more hopeful strain,
"With fresh air and exercise and careful avoidance of cold and night air
I am to be all right again." He then adds: "I am not fond of coddling;
but as Paddy gave his pig the best corner in his cabin--because 'shure,
he paid the rint'--I feel bound to take care of myself as a household
animal of value, to say nothing of other points."

Although he was never strong after this long illness, Huxley began
in 1889 to be much better. The first sign of returning vigor was the
eagerness with which he entered into a controversy with Gladstone.
Huxley had always enjoyed a mental battle; and some of his fiercest
tilts were with Gladstone. He even found the cause of better health in
this controversy, and was grateful to the "Grand Old Man" for making
home happy for him. From this time to his death, Huxley wrote a number
of articles on politics, science, and religion, many of which were
published in the volume called Controverted Questions. The main value of
these essays lies in the fact that Huxley calls upon men to give clear
reasons for the faith which they claim as theirs, and makes, as a friend
wrote of him, hazy thinking and slovenly, half-formed conclusions seem
the base thing they really are.

The last years of Huxley's life were indeed the longed-for Indian
summer. Away from the noise of London at Eastbourne by the sea, he spent
many happy hours with old-time friends and in his garden, which was
a great joy to him. His large family of sons and daughters and
grandchildren brought much cheer to his last days. Almost to the end he
was working and writing for publication. Three days before his death
he wrote to his old friend, Hooker, that he didn't feel at all like
"sending in his checks" and hoped to recover. He died very quietly on
June 29, 1895. That he met death with the same calm faith and strength
with which he had met life is indicated by the lines which his wife
wrote and which he requested to be his epitaph:--

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; For still He giveth His
beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.


To attempt an analysis of Huxley's character, unique and bafflingly
complex as it is, is beyond the scope of this sketch; but to give
only the mere facts of his life is to do an injustice to the vivid
personality of the man as it is revealed in his letters. All his human
interest in people and things--pets, and flowers, and family--brightens
many pages of the two ponderous volumes. Now one reads of his grief over
some backward-going plant, or over some garden tragedy, as "A lovely
clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just
died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!" Now one is amused
with a nonsense letter to one of his children, and again with an
account of a pet. "I wish you would write seriously to M----. She is
not behaving well to Oliver. I have seen handsomer kittens, but few more
lively, and energetically destructive. Just now he scratched away at
something M---- says cost 13s. 6d. a yard and reduced more or less of it
to combings. M---- therefore excludes him from the dining-room and
all those opportunities of higher education which he would have in MY
house." Frequently one finds a description of some event, so vividly
done that the mere reading of it seems like a real experience. An
account of Tennyson's burial in Westminster is a typical bit of
description:--

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the
choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light illuminated the
flower-covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one thought of the bright
succession of his works between the darkness before and the darkness
after. I am glad to say that the Royal Society was represented by four
of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself.
Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has
understood the drift of science.


No parts of the Life and Letters are more enjoyable than those
concerning the "Happy Family," as a friend of Huxley's names his
household. His family of seven children found their father a most
engaging friend and companion. He could tell them wonderful sea stories
and animal stories and could draw fascinating pictures. His son writes
of how when he was ill with scarlet fever he used to look forward to his
father's home-coming. "The solitary days--for I was the first victim in
the family--were very long, and I looked forward with intense interest
to one half-hour after dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes
from the history of a remarkable bull-terrier and his family that went
to the seaside in a most human and child-delighting manner. I have
seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fell
asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and lost it out of my life."

The account of the comradeship between Huxley and his wife reads like
a good old-time romance. He was attracted to her at first by
her "simplicity and directness united with an unusual degree of
cultivation," Huxley's son writes. On her he depended for advice in his
work, and for companionship at home and abroad when wandering in search
of health in Italy and Switzerland. When he had been separated from her
for some time, he wrote, "Nobody, children or anyone else, can be to me
what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and
this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other
things." Again he writes, "Against all trouble (and I have had my share)
I weigh a wife-comrade 'trew and fest' in all emergencies."

The letters also give one a clear idea of the breadth of Huxley's
interests, particularly of his appreciation of the various forms of art.
Huxley believed strongly in the arts as a refining and helpful influence
in education. He keenly enjoyed good music. Professor Hewes writes of
him that one breaking in upon him in the afternoon at South Kensington
would not infrequently be met "with a snatch of some melody of Bach's
fugue." He also liked good pictures, and always had among his friends
well-known artists, as Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton, and
Burne-Jones. He read poetry widely, and strongly advocated the teaching
of poetry in English schools. As to poetry, his own preferences are
interesting. Wordsworth he considered too discursive; Shelley was too
diffuse; Keats, he liked for pure beauty, Browning for strength, and
Tennyson for his understanding of modern science; but most frequently of
all he read Milton and Shakespeare.

As to Huxley's appearance, and as to the impression which his
personality made upon others, the description of a friend, Mr. G. W.
Smalley, presents him with striking force. "The square forehead, the
square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing dark
eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an
impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the
gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength--all
this belonged to Huxley and to him alone. The first glance magnetized
his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one
having authority, and not fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept
carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind,
yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was
masculine in everything--look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture,
sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art,
he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in
oratory or whatever else--he had simplicity."

Simplicity, directness, sincerity,--all these qualities describe Huxley;
but the one attribute which distinguishes him above all others is love
of truth. A love of truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, would
necessarily produce a scholarly habit of mind. It was the zealous search
for truth which determined his method of work. In science, Huxley would
"take at second hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching." Some one
reproached him for wasting time verifying what another had already done.
"If that is his practice," he commented, "his work will never live." The
same motive made him a master of languages. To be able to read at first
hand the writings of other nations, he learned German, French, Italian,
and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning to read Greek was to
see for himself if Aristotle really did say that the heart had only
three chambers--an error, he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the
translator. It was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him
impatient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own work has
all the breadth and freedom and universality of the scholar, but it has,
also, a quality equally distinctive of the scholar, namely, an infinite
precision in the matter of detail.

If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, also, a courageous
fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it, was to seek the truth;
his second was to teach it to others, and, if necessary, to contend
valiantly for it. To fail to teach what you honestly know to be true,
because it may harm your reputation, or even because it may give pain to
others, is cowardice. "I am not greatly concerned about any reputation,"
Huxley writes to his wife, "except that of being entirely honest and
straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publication of Man's
Place in Nature would ruin his career, Huxley passed on to others what
nature had revealed to him. He was regardless, also, of the confusion
and pain which his view would necessarily bring to those who had been
nourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or two and to do battle
with the world on the score of its old beliefs, has never been an easy
task since the world began. Certainly it required fearlessness and
determination to wrestle with the prejudices against science in the
middle of the nineteenth century--how much may be gathered from the
reading of Darwin's Life and Letters. The attitude of the times toward
science has already been indicated. One may be allowed to give one more
example from the reported address of a clergyman. "O ye men of science,
ye men of science, leave us our ancestors in paradise, and you may have
yours in Zoological gardens." The war was, for the most part, between
the clergy and the men of science, but it is necessary to remember
that Huxley fought not against Christianity, but against dogma; that
he fought not against the past,--he had great reverence for the
accomplishment of the past,--but against unwillingness to accept the new
truth of the present.

A scholar of the highest type and a fearless defender of true and honest
thinking, Huxley certainly was: but the quality which gives meaning to
his work, which makes it live, is a certain human quality due to the
fact that Huxley was always keenly alive to the relation of science to
the problems of life. For this reason, he was not content with the
mere acquirement of knowledge; and for this reason, also, he could not
quietly wait until the world should come to his way of thinking. Much
of the time, therefore, which he would otherwise naturally have spent
in research, he spent in contending for and in endeavoring to popularize
the facts of science. It was this desire to make his ideas prevail
that led Huxley to work for a mastery of the technique of speaking and
writing. He hated both, but taught himself to do both well. The end of
all his infinite pains about his writing was not because style for its
own sake is worth while, but because he saw that the only way to win
men to a consideration of his message was to make it perfectly clear and
attractive to them. Huxley's message to the people was that happiness,
usefulness, and even material prosperity depend upon an understanding
of the laws of nature. He also taught that a knowledge of the facts of
science is the soundest basis for moral law; that a clear sense of
the penalties which Nature inflicts for disobedience of her laws must
eventually be the greatest force for the purification of life. If he
was to be remembered, therefore, he desired that he should be remembered
primarily as one who had helped the people "to think truly and to live
rightly." Huxley's writing is, then, something more than a scholarly
exposition of abstruse matter; for it has been further devoted to the
increasing of man's capacity for usefulness, and to the betterment of
his life here on earth.




II -- SUBJECT-MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE


From the point of view of subject-matter, structure, and style, Huxley's
essays are admirably adapted to the uses of the student in English.
The themes of the essays are two, education and science. In these
two subjects Huxley earnestly sought to arouse interest and to impart
knowledge, because he believed that intelligence in these matters is
essential for the advancement of the race in strength and morality. Both
subjects, therefore, should be valuable to the student. In education,
certainly, he should be interested, since it is his main occupation, if
not his chief concern. Essays like A Liberal Education and The Principal
Subjects of Education may suggest to him the meaning of all his work,
and may suggest, also, the things which it would be well for him to
know; and, even more, a consideration of these subjects may arouse him
to a greater interest and responsibility than he usually assumes toward
his own mental equipment. Of greater interest probably will be the
subjects which deal with nature; for the ways of nature are more nearly
within the range of his real concerns than are the wherefores of study.
The story of the formation of a piece of chalk, the substance which lies
at the basis of all life, the habits of sea animals, are all subjects
the nature of which is akin to his own eager interest in the world.

Undoubtedly the subjects about which Huxley writes will "appeal" to
the student; but it is in analysis that the real discipline lies. For
analysis Huxley's essays are excellent. They illustrate "the clear power
of exposition," and such power is, as Huxley wrote to Tyndall, the one
quality the people want,--exposition "so clear that they may think they
understand even if they don't." Huxley obtains that perfect clearness
in his own work by simple definition, by keeping steadily before his
audience his intention, and by making plain throughout his lecture a
well-defined organic structure. No X-ray machine is needful to make the
skeleton visible; it stands forth with the parts all nicely related
and compactly joined. In reference to structure, his son and biographer
writes, "He loved to visualize his object clearly. The framework of
what he wished to say would always be drawn out first." Professor Ray
Lankester also mentions Huxley's love of form. "He deals with form not
only as a mechanical engineer IN PARTIBUS (Huxley's own description of
himself), but also as an artist, a born lover of form, a character which
others recognize in him though he does not himself set it down in his
analysis." Huxley's own account of his efforts to shape his work is
suggestive. "The fact is that I have a great love and respect for my
native tongue, and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I
write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them into proper shape;
and I believe I become more fastidious as I grow older." And, indeed,
there is a marked difference in firmness of structure between the
earlier essays, such as On the Educational Value of the Natural History
Sciences, written, as Huxley acknowledges, in great haste, and the
later essays, such as A Liberal Education and The Method of Scientific
Investigation. To trace and to define this difference will be most
helpful to the student who is building up a knowledge of structure for
his own use.

According to Huxley's biographer in the Life and Letters of Thomas Henry
Huxley, the essays which represent him at his best are those published
in 1868. They are A Piece of Chalk, A Liberal Education, and On the
Physical Basis of Life. In connection with the comment on these essays
is the following quotation which gives one interesting information as to
Huxley's method of obtaining a clear style:--

This lecture on A Piece of Chalk together with two others delivered this
year, seems to me to mark the maturing of his style into that mastery of
clear expression for which he deliberately labored, 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 sometime 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 illustration, 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.


Huxley's own theory as to how clearness is to be obtained gets at the
root of the matter. "For my part, I venture to doubt the wisdom of
attempting to mould one's style by any other process than that
of striving after the clear and forcible expression of definite
conceptions; in which process the Glassian precept, first catch your
definite conception, is probably the most difficult to obey."

Perfect clearness, above every other quality of style, certainly
is characteristic of Huxley; but clearness alone does not make
subject-matter literature. In addition to this quality, Huxley's writing
wins the reader by the racy diction, the homely illustration, the
plain, honest phrasing. All these and other qualities bring one into
an intimate relationship with his subject. A man of vast technical
learning, he is still so interested in the relation of his facts to the
problems of men that he is always able to infuse life into the driest
of subjects, in other words, to HUMANIZE his knowledge; and in the
estimation of Matthew Arnold, this is the true work of the scholar, the
highest mission of style.




III -- SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT-MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE


Although fully realizing that the questions here given are only such as
are generally used everywhere by instructors in English, the editor has,
nevertheless, included them with the hope that some one may find them
helpful.

The studies given include a few general questions and suggestions on
subject-matter, structure, and style. The questions on structure are
based on an analysis of the whole composition and of the paragraph;
those on style are based on a study of sentences and words. Such
a division of material may seem unwarranted; for, it may be urged,
firmness of structure depends, to a certain extent, upon sentence-form
and words; and clearness of style, to a large extent, upon the form of
the paragraph and whole composition. The two, certainly, cannot be in
justice separated; and especially is it true, more deeply true than the
average student can be brought to believe, that structure, "MIND, in
style" as Pater phrases it, primarily determines not only clearness, but
also such qualities of style as reserve, refinement, and simple Doric
beauty. Since, however, structure is more obviously associated with
the larger groups, and style with the smaller, the questions have been
arranged according to this division.


I. Suggestions for the Study of Subject-Matter.


1. To whom does Huxley address the essay?

2. Can you see any adaptation of his material to his audience?

3. How would A Piece of Chalk be differently presented if given before a
science club?

4. Does Huxley make his subject interesting? If so, how does he
accomplish this?

5. Is the personality of Huxley suggested by the essays? See Life and
Letters, vol. ii, p. 293.


II. Suggestions for the Study of Structure.


A. Analysis of the whole composition.

1. State in one complete sentence the theme of the essay.

2. Analyze the essay for the logical development of the thought.

a. Questions on the Introduction.

In the introduction, how does the author approach his material?

Does he give the main points of the essay?

Does he give his reasons for writing?

Does he narrow his subject to one point of view?

Is the introduction a digression?

b. Questions on the Body.

Can you find large groups of thought?

Are these groups closely related to the theme and to each other?

Do you find any digressions?

Is the method used in developing the groups inductive or deductive?

Is the method different in different groups?

Are the groups arranged for good emphasis in the whole composition?

c. Questions on the Conclusion.

How does the author conclude the essay?

Does the conclusion sum up the points of the essay?

Are any new points suggested?

Is the thought of the whole essay stated?

Do you consider it a strong conclusion?

3. Make out an outline which shall picture the skeleton of the essay
studied. In making the outline express the topics in the form of
complete statements, phrase the thought for clear sequence, and be
careful about such matters as spacing and punctuation.

B. Analysis of paragraph structure.

1. Can a paragraph be analyzed in the same manner as the whole
composition?

2. Can you express the thought of each paragraph in a complete sentence?

3. Can you find different points presented in the paragraph developing
the paragraph topic, as the large groups of the whole composition
develop the theme?

4. Are the paragraphs closely related, and how are they bound together?

5. Can any of the paragraphs be combined to advantage?

6. Read from Barrett Wendell's English Composition the chapter on
paragraphs. Are Huxley's paragraphs constructed in accordance with the
principles given in this chapter?

7. Is the paragraph type varied? For paragraph types, see Scott and
Denny's Paragraph Writing.

C. Comparative study of the structure of the essay.

1. Do you find any difference between Huxley's earlier and later
essays as regards the structure of the whole, or the structure of the
paragraph?

2. Which essay seems to you to be most successful in structure?

3. Has the character of the audience any influence upon the structure of
the essays?

4. Compare the structure of one of Huxley's essays with that of some
other essay recently studied.

5. Has the nature of the material any influence upon the structure of
the essay?


III. Suggestions for the Study of Style.


A. Exactly what do you mean by style?

B. Questions on sentence structure.

1. From any given essay, group together sentences which are long, short,
loose, periodic, balanced, simple, compound; note those peculiar, for
any reason, to Huxley.

2. Stevenson says, "The one rule is to be infinitely various; to
interest, to disappoint, to surprise and still to gratify; to be ever
changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of
ingenious neatness."

Do Huxley's sentences conform to Stevenson's rule? Compare Huxley's
sentences with Stevenson's for variety in form. Is there any reason for
the difference between the form of the two writers?

3. Does this quotation from Pater's essay on Style describe Huxley's
sentences? "The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression
of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously
intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single
word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look closely, you
can see contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly qualified matter
into compass at one view."

4. How do Huxley's sentences compare with those of Ruskin, or with those
of any author recently studied?

5. Are Huxley's sentences musical? How does an author make his sentences
musical?

C. Questions on words.

1. Do you find evidence of exactness, a quality which Huxley said he
labored for?

2. Are the words general or specific in character?

3. How does Huxley make his subject-matter attractive?

4. From what sources does Huxley derive his words? Are they every-day
words, or more scholarly in character?

5. Do you find any figures? Are these mainly ornamental or do they
re-enforce the thought?

8. Are there many allusions and quotations? Can you easily recognize the
source?

7. Pater says in his essay on Style that the literary artist "begets
a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the
strictest sense original." Do you find that Huxley's vocabulary suggests
the man?

8. Does Huxley seem to search for "the smooth, or winsome, or forcible
word, as such, or quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment
to its meaning"?

9. Make out a list of the words and proper names in any given essay
which are not familiar to you; write out the explanation of these in the
form of notes giving any information which is interesting and relevant.

D. General questions on style.

1. How is Huxley's style adapted to the subject-matter?

2. Can you explain the difference in style of the different essays by
the difference in purpose?

3. Compare Huxley's way of saying things with some other author's way of
saying things.

4. Huxley says of his essays to workingmen, "I only wish I had had the
sense to anticipate the run these have had here and abroad, and I would
have revised them properly. As they stand they are terribly in the
rough, from a literary point of view."

Do you find evidences of roughness?




THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY -- AUTOBIOGRAPHY [1]


And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which I have
upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in this manner at
my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in all circumstances,
these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than things of
greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do.--Bishop Butler to the
Duchess of Somerset.


The "many things" to which the Duchess's correspondent here refers are
the repairs and improvements of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt
if the great apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity of
his character, would have considered the writing an account of himself
as a thing which could be put upon him to do whatever circumstances
might be taken in. But the good bishop lived in an age when a man
might write books and yet be permitted to keep his private existence
to himself; in the pre-Boswellian [2] epoch, when the germ of the
photographer lay concealed in the distant future, and the interviewer
who pervades our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of
time.

At present, the most convinced believer in the aphorism "Bene qui
latuit, bene vixit,"[3] is not always able to act up to it. An
importunate person informs him that his portrait is about to be
published and will be accompanied by a biography which the importunate
person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what that means; either he
undertakes to revise the "biography" or he does not. In the former case,
he makes himself responsible; in the latter, he allows the publication
of a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for which he will be
held responsible by those who are familiar with the prevalent art of
self-advertisement. On the whole, it may be better to get over the
"burlesque of being employed in this manner" and do the thing himself.

It was by reflections of this kind that, some years ago, I was led to
write and permit the publication of the subjoined sketch.


I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on the 4th of May, 1825,
at Ealing, which was, at that time, as quiet a little country village as
could be found within a half-a-dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Now it
is a suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants. My father was
one of the masters in a large semi-public school which at one time had a
high reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrival
in this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional
account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of
great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in
consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason,
probably, a neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony,
pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the
horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only
abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled
on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous
eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth,
capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and State.
But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself
through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language,
than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's
prospects of advancement.

Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know; but it is a curious
chance that my parents should have fixed for my usual denomination upon
the name of that particular Apostle with whom I have always felt
most sympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so
completely--even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made
their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed
them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an
inborn faculty for drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never
been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose
which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic
temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw
in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle
classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most
distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If
one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any
conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it, things flash across me."
That peculiarity has been passed 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. But, after all, if my time were to come
over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my
inheritance of mother wit.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. In later years my
mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah!
you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in concluding
that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks. In
fact, I have a distinct recollection of certain curls of which I was
vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome,
courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and
who was as a god to us country folk, because he was occasionally visited
by the then Prince George of Cambridge. [4] I remember turning my
pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and
preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in
Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning when the rest of the family were
at church. That is the earliest indication I can call to mind of the
strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer [5]
has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most part
remained in a latent state.

My regular school training was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately,
for though my way of life has made me acquainted with all sorts and
conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm
that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known.
We boys were average lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good
and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared
about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they
were baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle
for existence among ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill
practices current among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in
connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I
had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it
no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element
in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked
my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the
extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course
of things in general, arose out of the fact that I--the victor--had
a black eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into
disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested.
One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told
a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a
stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long
story of family misfortune to account for his position, but at that time
it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in
New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfortunate young man
had not only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one colonial
conviction.

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but
the fates were against this and, while very young, I commenced the study
of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute
of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that
I have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus
infidelium.[6] I am now occasionally horrified to think how very little
I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only
part of my professional course which really and deeply interested me was
physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am
afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never
collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I
cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business,
the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and
thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of
similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction
I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly
proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between
thirteen and fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older
student friends of mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever
attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the
disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my
curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three
hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary
symptoms of dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow,
and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last
chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of
my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire.
I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring
morning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to
come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odor of
wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farm-yard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets."[7]
I soon recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of
internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal
dyspepsia, commenced his half century of co-tenancy of my fleshly
tabernacle.

Looking back on my "Lehrjahre,"[8] I am sorry to say that I do not think
that any account of my doings as a student would tend to edification.
In fact, I should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating
my example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did
not--which was a very frequent case--I was extremely idle (unless making
caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch
of industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong directions. I read
everything I could lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all
sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as speedily. No doubt it was
very largely my own fault, but the only instruction from which I ever
obtained the proper effect of education was that which I received from
Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology at the Charing
Cross School of Medicine. The extent and precision of his knowledge
impressed me greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of
lecturing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so
much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since. I worked hard
to obtain his approbation, and he was extremely kind and helpful to the
youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had
any right to do. It was he who suggested the publication of my first
scientific paper--a very little one--in the Medical Gazette of 1845, and
most kindly corrected the literary faults which abounded in it, short as
it was; for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I detested the
trouble of writing, and would take no pains over it.

It was in the early spring of 1846, that, having finished my obligatory
medical studies and passed the first M. D. examination at the London
University,--though I was still too young to qualify at the College
of Surgeons,--I was talking to a fellow-student (the present eminent
physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), and wondering what I should do to meet
the imperative necessity for earning my own bread, when my friend
suggested that I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that
time Director-General for the Medical Service of the Navy, for an
appointment. I thought this rather a strong thing to do, as Sir William
was personally unknown to me, but my cheery friend would not listen to
my scruples, so I went to my lodgings and wrote the best letter I could
devise. A few days afterwards I received the usual official circular
acknowledgment, but at the bottom there was written an instruction
to call at Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked like
business, so at the appointed time I called and sent in my card, while
I waited in Sir William's ante-room. He was a tall, shrewd-looking old
gentleman, with a broad Scotch accent--and I think I see him now as he
entered with my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to return
it, with the frugal reminder that I should probably find it useful on
some other occasion. The second was to ask whether I was an Irishman.
I suppose the air of modesty about my appeal must have struck him. I
satisfied the Director-General that I was English to the backbone, and
he made some inquiries as to my student career, finally desiring me
to hold myself ready for examination. Having passed this, I was in Her
Majesty's Service, and entered on the books of Nelson's [9] old ship,
the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months after
I made my application.

My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable person, the late
Sir John Richardson, an excellent naturalist, and far-famed as an
indomitable Arctic traveller. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the
circle of his family and intimates; and, having a full share of youthful
vanity, I was extremely disgusted to find that "Old John," as we
irreverent youngsters called him, took not the slightest notice of my
worshipful self either the first time I attended him, as it was my duty
to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I am afraid to think of the lengths
to which my tongue may have run on the subject of the churlishness
of the chief, who was, in truth, one of the kindest-hearted and most
considerate of men. But one day, as I was crossing the hospital square,
Sir John stopped me, and heaped coals of fire on my head by telling
me that he had tried to get me one of the resident appointments, much
coveted by the assistant surgeons, but that the Admiralty had put in
another man. "However," said he, "I mean to keep you here till I can get
you something you will like," and turned upon his heel without waiting
for the thanks I stammered out. That explained how it was I had not been
packed off to the West Coast of Africa like some of my juniors, and why,
eventually, I remained altogether seven months at Haslar.

After a long interval, during which "Old John" ignored my existence
almost as completely as before, he stopped me again as we met in a
casual way, and describing the service on which the Rattlesnake was
likely to be employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who was to
command the ship, had asked him to recommend an assistant surgeon who
knew something of science; would I like that? Of course I jumped at
the offer. "Very well, I give you leave; go to London at once and see
Captain Stanley." I went, saw my future commander, who was very civil
to me, and promised to ask that I should be appointed to his ship, as in
due time I was. It is a singular thing that, during the few months of my
stay at Haslar, I had among my messmates two future Directors-General
of the Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alexander Armstrong and Sir John
Watt-Reid), with the present President of the College of Physicians and
my kindest of doctors, Sir Andrew Clark.

Life on board Her Majesty's ship in those days was a very different
affair from what it is now, and ours was exceptionally rough, as we
were often many months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised
people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being about
the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with
people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south coast of
New Guinea--and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting
savage and semi-civilised people. But, apart from experience of
this kind and the opportunities offered 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 necessaries; to find out how extremely well worth living
life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank,
with the sky for canopy and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect
for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of
what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I
along with it. My brother officers were as good fellows 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 pursuit of the objects which my friends, the middies,[10] christened
"Buffons," after the title conspicuous on a volume of the Suites a
Buffon,[11] which stood on my shelf in the chart room.

During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication after
communication to the "Linnean Society,"[12] with the same result as that
obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last
of hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die, and in 1849
I drew up a more elaborate paper and forwarded it to the Royal
Society.[13] This was my dove, if I had only known it. But owing to the
movements of the ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return
to England in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found that it was
printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited
me. When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy
and encouragement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was not the
least valuable part of my education.

Three years after my return were occupied by a battle between my
scientific friends on the one hand and the Admiralty on the other, as
to whether the latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a
pledge they had given to encourage officers who had done scientific
work by contributing to the expense of publishing mine. At last the
Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by
ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as
Rastignac,[14] in the Pere Goriot [15] says to Paris, I said to London
"a nous deux." I desired to obtain a Professorship of either Physiology
or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies occurred I applied, but in
vain. My friend, Professor Tyndall,[16] and I were candidates at the
same time, he for the Chair of Physics and I for that of Natural History
in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately, as it turned out,
would not look at either of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of
respect for Toronto, but because I soon made up my mind that London was
the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the inducements to
leave it, which have at various times been offered. 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 vacated of Paleontologist 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 paleontological.

At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm conviction that
I should break down every time I opened my mouth. I believe I had every
fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging
in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever
addressed, on a Friday evening at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet,
I must confess to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public
speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the last ten years it
ceased to be so much of a bugbear to me. I used to pity myself for
having to go through this training, but I am now more disposed to
compassionate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever friendly
hearers at the Royal Institution, who were the subjects of my oratorical
experiments.

The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of
the work of my life, or to say at the end of the day whether I think
I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges
of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are. Life seems
terribly foreshortened as they look back and the mountain they set
themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably
higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top. But if I may
speak of the objects I have had more or less definitely in view since I
began the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly these: To promote
the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the application of
scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the
best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth
and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the
sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the
resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe
by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable, or
unreasonable, ambition for scientific fame which I may have permitted
myself to entertain to other ends; to the popularization of science; to
the development and organisation of scientific education; to the
endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution; and to untiring
opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit,[17] that clericalism, which in
England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong,
is the deadly enemy of science.

In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have been but one
among many, and I shall be well content to be remembered, or even not
remembered, as such. Circumstances, among which I am proud to reckon the
devoted kindness of many friends, have led to my occupation of various
prominent positions, among which the Presidency of the Royal Society is
the highest. It would be mock modesty on my part, with these and other
scientific honours which have been bestowed upon me, to pretend that I
have not succeeded in the career which I have followed, rather because
I was driven into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid I should
not count even these things as marks of success if I could not hope that
I had somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the
New Reformation.[18]




ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE [19]


This time two hundred years ago--in the beginning of January,
1666--those of our forefathers who inhabited this great and ancient
city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not
quite past, although its fury had abated; the other to come.

Within a few yards of the very spot [20] on which we are assembled, so
the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, the plague, appeared
in the latter months of 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the
people of England, and especially of her capital, with a violence
unknown before, in the course of the following year. The hand of a
master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in that
truest of fictions, The History of the Plague Year, Defoe [21] shows
death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through the
narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a silence
broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; by
the woeful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the madder
yells of despairing profligates.

But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to nearly its
ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only here and there, and
the richer citizens who had flown from the pest had returned to their
dwellings. The remnant of the people began to toil at the accustomed
round of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream of city life bid fair to
flow back along its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigour.

The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned
no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which
broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of
that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people
were all that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city within
the walls.


Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each of these
calamities. They submitted to the plague in humility and in penitence,
for they believed it to be the judgment of God. But, towards the fire
they were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the
malice of man,--as the work of the Republicans, or of the Papists,
according as their prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of
Puritanism.

It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I
now stand, in what was then a thickly peopled and fashionable part of
London, should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now
propound to you--that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the
plague was no more, in their sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was
the work of any political, or of any religious sect; but that they were
themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look
to themselves to prevent the recurrence of calamities, to all appearance
so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control--so evidently the result
of the wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy.

And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the holy cursing of
the Puritan of that day would have chimed in with the unholy cursing
and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys,[22] and with the
revilings of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer
had gone on to say that, if the return of such misfortunes were ever
rendered impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the
faith of Laud,[23] or of that of Milton; and, as little, by the triumph
of republicanism, as by that of monarchy. But that the one thing needful
for compassing this end was, that the people of England should second
the efforts of an insignificant corporation, the establishment of which,
a few years before the epoch of the great plague and the great fire, had
been as little noticed, as they were conspicuous.


Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few calm and
thoughtful students banded themselves together for the purpose, as they
phrased it, of "improving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed
to attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the words of one of the
founders of the organisation:--

"Our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) to
discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries, and such as related
thereunto:--as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments;
with the state of these studies and their cultivation at home and
abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves
in the veins, the venae lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican
hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of
Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots
on the sun and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and
selenography [24] of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury,
the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose,
the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities
and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment [25] in
quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration
therein, with divers other things of like nature, some of which were
then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced
as now they are; with other things appertaining to what hath been called
the New Philosophy, which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir
Francis Bacon [26] (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated
in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in
England."

The learned Dr. Wallis,[27] writing in 1696, narrates in these words,
what happened half a century before, or about 1645. The associates met
at Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to become a
bishop; and subsequently coming together in London, they attracted
the notice of the king. And it is a strange evidence of the taste for
knowledge which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared with
his father and grandfather, that Charles the Second was not content with
saying witty things about his philosophers, but did wise things with
regard to them. For he not only bestowed upon them such attention as he
could spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but, being in his usual
state of impecuniosity, begged for them of the Duke of Ormond; and, that
step being without effect, gave them Chelsea College, a charter, and
a mace: crowning his favours in the best way they could be crowned, by
burdening them no further with royal patronage or state interference.

Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studious of the "New
Philosophy," [28] who met in one another's lodgings in Oxford or in
London, in the middle of the seventeenth century, grew in numerical and
in real strength, until, in its latter part, the "Royal Society for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had
acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever
since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our
islands, and the chief champion of the cause it was formed to support.

It was by the aid of the Royal Society [29] that Newton [30] published
his Principia. If all the books in the world, except the Philosophical
Transactions, [31] were destroyed, it is safe to say that the
foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast
intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though
incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of halting or of decrepitude
manifested themselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so
in these, "our business is, precluding theology and state affairs,
to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But our
"Mathematick" is one which Newton would have to go to school to
learn; our "Staticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural
Experiments" constitute a mass of physical and chemical knowledge, a
glimpse at which would compensate Galileo [32] for the doings of a score
of inquisitorial cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced
such infinite varieties of beings, have laid open such new worlds in
time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex
problems, that the eyes of Vesalius [33] and of Harvey [34] might be
dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of
mustard seed.

The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too little, forced upon one's
notice, nowadays, that all this marvellous intellectual growth has a no
less wonderful expression in practical life; and that, in this respect,
if in no other, the movement symbolised by the progress of the Royal
Society stands without a parallel in the history of mankind.

A series of volumes as bulky as the "Transactions of the Royal Society"
might possibly be filled with the subtle speculations [35] of the
Schoolmen;[36] not improbably, the obtaining a mastery over the products
of mediaeval thought might necessitate an even greater expenditure of
time and of energy than the acquirement of the "New Philosophy"; but
though such work engrossed the best intellects of Europe for a longer
time than has elapsed since the great fire, its effects were "writ in
water,"[37] so far as our social state is concerned.

On the other hand, if the noble first President of the Royal Society
could revisit the upper air and once more gladden his eyes with a sight
of the familiar mace, he would find himself in the midst of a material
civilisation more different from that of his day, than that of the
seventeenth was from that of the first century. And if Lord Brouncker's
[38] native sagacity had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long
reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these
telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without which the
whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of
stagnant and starving pauperism,--that all these pillars of our State
are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great
spiritual stream, the springs of which only, he and his fellows were
privileged to see; and seeing, to recognise as that which it behoved
them above all things to keep pure and undefiled.

It may not be too great a flight of imagination to conceive our noble
revenant [39] not forgetful of the great troubles of his own day, and
anxious to know how often London had been burned down since his time
and how often the plague had carried off its thousands. He would have to
learn that, although London contains tenfold the inflammable matter that
it did in 1666; though, not content with filling our rooms with woodwork
and light draperies, we must needs lead inflammable and explosive gases
into every corner of our streets and houses, we never allow even a
street to burn down. And if he asked how this had come about, we should
have to explain that the improvement of natural knowledge has furnished
us with dozens of machines for throwing water upon fires, any one of
which would have furnished the ingenious Mr. Hooke, the first "curator
and experimenter" of the Royal Society, with ample materials for
discourse before half a dozen meetings of that body; and that, to say
truth, except for the progress of natural knowledge, we should not
have been able to make even the tools by which these machines are
constructed. And, further, it would be necessary to add, that although
severe fires sometimes occur and inflict great damage, the loss is very
generally compensated by societies, the operations of which have been
rendered possible only by the progress of natural knowledge in the
direction of mathematics, and the accumulation of wealth in virtue of
other natural knowledge.

But the plague? My Lord Brouncker's observation would not, I fear, lead
him to think that Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purer in
life, or more fervent in religious faith, than the generation which
could produce a Boyle,[40] an Evelyn,[41] and a Milton. He might find
the mud of society at the bottom, instead of at the top, but I fear that
the sum total would be as deserving of swift judgment as at the time of
the Restoration.[42] And it would be our duty to explain once more, and
this time not without shame, that we have no reason to believe that it
is the improvement of our faith, nor that of our morals, which keeps
the plague from our city; but, again, that it is the improvement of our
natural knowledge.

We have learned that pestilences will only take up their abode among
those who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them.
Their cities must have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulated
garbage. Their houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated.
Their subjects must be ill-washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed. The London
of 1665 was such a city. The cities of the East, where plague has an
enduring dwelling, are such cities. We, in later times, have learned
somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. Because of this partial
improvement of our natural knowledge and of that fractional obedience,
we have no plague; because that knowledge is still very imperfect and
that obedience yet incomplete, typhoid is our companion and cholera our
visitor. But it is not presumptuous to express the belief that, when
our knowledge is more complete and our obedience the expression of our
knowledge, London will count her centuries of freedom from typhoid
and cholera, as she now gratefully reckons her two hundred years of
ignorance of that plague which swooped upon her thrice in the first half
of the seventeenth century.

Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which is not fully
borne out by the facts? Surely, the principles involved in them are now
admitted among the fixed beliefs of all thinking men? Surely, it is true
that our countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, pestilence,
and all the evils which result from a want of command over and due
anticipation of the course of Nature, than were the countrymen of
Milton; and health, wealth, and well-being are more abundant with us
than with them? But no less certainly is the difference due to the
improvement of our knowledge of Nature, and the extent to which that
improved knowledge has been incorporated with the household words of
men, and has supplied the springs of their daily actions.

Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the depreciators of
natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that its improvement can only
add to the resources of our material civilisation; admitting it to be
possible that the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked
for not other reward than this, I cannot confess that I was guilty
of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of
distinguishing between prominent events and important events, the origin
of a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge
might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare
of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to
mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by those ghastly evils
would shrink into insignificance.

It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, hundreds
of mankind exist and find a fair share of happiness in the world by the
aid of the spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could
not have burned the supply of coal, the daily working of which, in the
bowels of the earth, made possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an
amount of wealth to which the millions lost in old London are but as an
old song.


But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, possessing
an accidental value; and natural knowledge creates multitudes of more
subtle contrivances, the praises of which do not happen to be sung
because they are not directly convertible into instruments for creating
wealth. When I contemplate natural knowledge squandering such gifts
among men, the only appropriate comparison I can find for her is to
liken her to such a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever
upward, heavily burdened, and with mind bent only on her home; but
yet without effort and without thought, knitting for her children.
Now stockings are good and comfortable things, and the children
will undoubtedly be much the better for them; but surely it would be
short-sighted, to say the least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother
as a mere stocking-machine--a mere provider of physical comforts?

However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and not a few of them,
who take this view of natural knowledge, and can see nothing in the
bountiful mother of humanity but a sort of comfort-grinding machine.
According to them, the improvement of natural knowledge always has been,
and always must be, synonymous with no more than the improvement of the
material resources and the increase of the gratifications of men.

Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother of mankind, bringing
them up with kindness, and, if need be, with sternness, in the way they
should go, and instructing them in all things needful for their welfare;
but a sort of fairy god-mother, ready to furnish her pets with shoes of
swiftness, swords of sharpness, and omnipotent Aladdin's lamps,[43] so
that they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and see the other side of the
moon, and thank God they are better than their benighted ancestors.

If this talk were true, I, for one, should not greatly care to toil
in the service of natural knowledge. I think I would just as soon be
quietly chipping my own flint axe, after the manner of my forefathers
a few thousand years back, as be troubled with the endless malady of
thought which now infests us all, for such reward. But I venture to
say that such views are contrary alike to reason and to fact. Those who
discourse in such fashion seem to me to be so intent upon trying to see
what is above Nature, or what is behind her, that they are blind to what
stares them in the face in her.

I should not venture thus to speak strongly if my justification were not
to be found in the simplest and most obvious facts,--if it needed more
than an appeal to the most notorious truths to justify my assertion,
that the improvement of natural knowledge, whatever direction it has
taken, and however low the aims of those who may have commenced it--has
not only conferred practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, has
effected a revolution in their conceptions of the universe and of
themselves, and has profoundly altered their modes of thinking and
their views of right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seeking
to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still
spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to
ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of
conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.


Let us take these points separately; and first, what great ideas has
natural knowledge introduced into men's minds?

I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural knowledge were
laid when the reason of man first came face to face with the facts of
Nature; when the savage first learned that the fingers of one hand are
fewer than those of both; that it is shorter to cross a stream than to
head it; that a stone stops where it is unless it be moved, and that it
drops from the hand which lets it go; that light and heat come and go
with the sun; that sticks burn away in a fire; that plants and animals
grow and die; that if he struck his fellow savage a blow he would make
him angry, and perhaps get a blow in return, while if he offered him a
fruit he would please him, and perhaps receive a fish in exchange. When
men had acquired this much knowledge, the outlines, rude though they
were, of mathematics, of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of moral,
economical, and political science, were sketched. Nor did the germ of
religion fail when science began to bud. Listen to words which, though
new, are yet three thousand years old:--

. . . When in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all
the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And
valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and
all the stars Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart.[44]


If the half savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, it is
irrational to doubt that he went further, to find as we do, that upon
that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,--the little light of
awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss
of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than
illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations
that cannot be realised, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this
consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret
which he cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and the
attempt to embody it in the forms furnished by the intellect is the
origin of the higher theologies.

Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the foundations of all
knowledge--secular or sacred--were laid when intelligence dawned, though
the superstructure remained for long ages so slight and feeble as to be
compatible with the existence of almost any general view respecting the
mode of governance of the universe. No doubt, from the first, there were
certain phenomena which, to the rudest mind, presented a constancy of
occurrence, and suggested that a fixed order ruled, at any rate, among
them. I doubt if the grossest of Fetish worshippers ever imagined that
a stone must have a god within it to make it fall, or that a fruit had
a god within it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such matters
as these, it is hardly questionable that mankind from the first took
strictly positive and scientific views.

But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences which present
themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, has always taken himself as the
standard of comparison, as the centre and measure of the world; nor
could be well avoid doing so. And finding that his apparently uncaused
will has a powerful effect in giving rise to many occurrences, he
naturally enough ascribed other and greater events to other and greater
volitions and came to look upon the world and all that therein is, as
the product of the volitions of persons like himself, but stronger, and
capable of being appeased or angered, as he himself might be soothed
or irritated. Through such conceptions of the plan and working of
the universe all mankind have passed, or are passing. And we may
now consider what has been the effect of the improvement of natural
knowledge on the views of men who have reached this stage, and who
have begun to cultivate natural knowledge with no desire but that of
"increasing God's honour and bettering man's estate."[45]

For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material point of view,
more innocent, from a theological one, to an ancient people, than that
they should learn the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for
their husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to their
rude navigators?[46] But what has grown out of this search for natural
knowledge of so merely useful a character? You all know the reply.
Astronomy,--which of all sciences has filled men's minds with general
ideas of a character most foreign to their daily experience, and has,
more than any other, rendered it impossible for them to accept the
beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy,--which tells them that this so vast
and seemingly solid earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no man
knows whither, through illimitable space; which demonstrates that what
we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that space, filled by an
infinitely subtle matter whose particles are seething and surging, like
the waves of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions where
nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known, but matter and
force, operating according to rigid rules; which leads us to contemplate
phaenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they must have
had a beginning, and that they must have an end, but the very nature of
which also proves that the beginning was, to our conceptions of time,
infinitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably distant.

But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread
and receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and
distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly
utilitarian? Yet out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's
abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that Nature does not
abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way
for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force which
produces weight is co-extensive with the universe,--in short, to the
theory of universal gravitation and endless force. While learning how
to handle gases led to the discovery of oxygen, and to modern chemistry,
and to the notion of the indestructibility of matter.

Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the attempt to
keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the wheel turns round very
fast? How useful for carters and gig drivers to know something about
this; and how good were it, if any ingenious person would find out the
cause of such phaenomena, and thence educe a general remedy for
them. Such an ingenious person was Count Rumford;[47] and he and
his successors have landed us in the theory of the persistence, or
indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, as in the
infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of the kinds
called physical and chemical, have everywhere found a definite order and
succession of events which seem never to be infringed.

And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? Have the anatomist,
the physiologist, or the physician, whose business it has been to devote
themselves assiduously to that eminently practical and direct end,
the alleviation of the sufferings of mankind,--have they been able to
confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear they
are the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before
us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the
duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have
demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and
the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike
proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and
succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all
these, but have added more startling theses of their own. For, as the
astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an
eccentric [48] speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the
living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the
astronomers observe the mark of practically endless time set upon
the arrangements of the solar system so the student of life finds the
records of ancient forms of existence peopling the world for ages,
which, in relation to human experience, are infinite.

Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its
manifestation of particular molecular arrangements as any physical or
chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order
and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of
Nature.

Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion.
Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and
interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has
taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism
or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their
relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is
needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present
differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present
has become more scientific than that of the past; because it has not
only renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see
the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and
traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of cherishing the
noblest and most human of man's emotions, by worship "for the most part
of the silent sort" at the Altar of the Unknown.

Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in our minds by the
improvement of natural knowledge. Men have acquired the ideas of
the practically infinite extent of the universe and of its practical
eternity; they are familiar with the conception that our earth is but an
infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe which can be seen;
and that, nevertheless, its duration is, as compared with our standards
of time, infinite. They have further acquired the idea that man is but
one of innumerable forms of life now existing on the globe, and that
the present existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of
predecessors. Moreover, every step they have made in natural knowledge
has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conception of a
definite order of the universe--which is embodied in what are called,
by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature--and to narrow the range and
loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other
than such as arise out of that definite order itself.

Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the question. No one
can deny that they exist, and have been the inevitable outgrowth of the
improvement of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be doubted that
they are changing the form of men's most cherished and most important
convictions.


And as regards the second point--the extent to which the improvement
of natural knowledge has remodelled and altered what may be termed the
intellectual ethics of men,--what are among the moral convictions most
fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people?

They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of
belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting
disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin; that when good authority
has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason
has no further duty. There are many excellent persons who yet hold by
these principles, and it is not my present business, or intention, to
discuss their views. All I wish to bring clearly before your minds is
the unquestionable fact, that the improvement of natural knowledge
is effected by methods which directly give the lie to all these
convictions, and assume the exact reverse of each to be true.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge
authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind
faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every
great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection
of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation
of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science
holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates
hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and
wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses
to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source,
Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment
and to observation--Nature will confirm them. The man of science has
learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise the practical results
of the improvement of natural knowledge, and its beneficial influence
on material civilisation, it must, I think, be admitted that the great
ideas, some of which I have indicated, and the ethical spirit which
I have endeavoured to sketch, in the few moments which remained at my
disposal, constitute the real and permanent significance of natural
knowledge.

If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more and more
firmly established as the world grows older; if that spirit be fated, as
I believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought,
and to become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if, as our race
approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there
is but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then
we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to
recognise the advisableness of improving natural knowledge, and so to
aid ourselves and our successors in our course towards the noble goal
which lies before mankind.




A LIBERAL EDUCATION [49]


The business which the South London Working Men's College has undertaken
is a great work; indeed, I might say, that Education, with which that
college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those which lie
ready to a man's hand just at present.

And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised. You
cannot go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or less confused and
contradictory talk on this subject--nor can you fail to notice that,
in one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like
discussions in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural interest now
dares to say that education is a bad thing. If any representative of the
once large and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed this
opinion, still exists in the semi-fossil state, he keeps his thoughts
to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in
their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that education is
the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country is not
shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.

The politicians tell us, "You must educate the masses because they are
going to be masters." The clergy join in the cry for education, for they
affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel into
the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell
the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that
England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines,
cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod![50] the glory
will be departed from us. And a few voices are lifted up in favour of
the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and
women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that
it is as true now, as it ever was, that the people perish for lack of
knowledge.

These members of the minority, with whom I confess I have a good deal of
sympathy, are doubtful whether any of the other reasons urged in favour
of the education of the people are of much value--whether, indeed, some
of them are based upon either wise or noble grounds of action. They
question if it be wise to tell people that you will do for them, out
of fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long as your only
motive was compassion for their weakness and their sorrows. And, if
ignorance of everything which is needful a ruler should know is likely
to do so much harm in the governing classes of the future, why is it,
they ask reasonably enough, that such ignorance in the governing classes
of the past has not been viewed with equal horror?

Compare the average artisan and the average country squire, and it may
be doubted if you will find a pin to choose between the two in point of
ignorance, class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the ignorance is
of a different sort--that the class feeling is in favour of a different
class and that the prejudice has a distinct savour of wrong-headedness
in each case--but it is questionable if the one is either a bit better,
or a bit worse, than the other. The old protectionist theory is the
doctrine of trades unions as applied by the squires, and the modern
trades unionism is the doctrine of the squires applied by the artisans.
Why should we be worse off under one regime than under the other?

Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to think whether it
is really want of education which keeps the masses away from their
ministrations--whether the most completely educated men are not as open
to reproach on this score as the workmen; and whether, perchance, this
may not indicate that it is not education which lies at the bottom of
the matter?

Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, venture to doubt
whether the glory which rests upon being able to undersell all the rest
of the world, is a very safe kind of glory--whether we may not purchase
it too dear; especially if we allow education, which ought to be
directed to the making of men, to be diverted into a process of
manufacturing human tools, wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some
technical industry, but good for nothing else.

And, finally, these people inquire whether it is the masses alone who
need a reformed and improved education. They ask whether the richest of
our public schools might not well be made to supply knowledge, as well
as gentlemanly habits, a strong class feeling, and eminent proficiency
in cricket. They seem to think that the noble foundations of our old
universities are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present
posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where men are
trained to win a senior wranglership,[51] or a double-first,[52] as
horses are trained to win a cup, with as little reference to the needs
of after-life in the case of a man as in that of the racer. And, while
as zealous for education as the rest, they affirm that, if the education
of the richer classes were such as to fit them to be the leaders and
the governors of the poorer; and, if the education of the poorer classes
were such as to enable them to appreciate really wise guidance and good
governance, the politicians need not fear mob-law, nor the clergy lament
their want of flocks, nor the capitalists prognosticate the annihilation
of the prosperity of the country.

Such is the diversity of opinion upon the why and the wherefore of
education. And my hearers will be prepared to expect that the practical
recommendations which are put forward are not less discordant. There is
a loud cry for compulsory education. We English, in spite of constant
experience to the contrary, preserve a touching faith in the efficacy of
acts of Parliament; and I believe we should have compulsory education
in the courses of next session, if there were the least probability that
half a dozen leading statesmen of different parties would agree what
that education should be.

Some hold that education without theology is worse than none. Others
maintain, quite as strongly, that education with theology is in the same
predicament. But this is certain, that those who hold the first opinion
can by no means agree what theology should be taught; and that those who
maintain the second are in a small minority.

At any rate "make people learn to read, write, and cipher," say a great
many; and the advice is undoubtedly sensible as far as it goes. But,
as has happened to me in former days, those who, in despair of getting
anything better, advocate this measure, are met with the objection that
it is very like making a child practise the use of a knife, fork, and
spoon, without giving it particle of meat. I really don't know what
reply is to be made to such an objection.

But it would be unprofitable to spend more time in disentangling,
or rather in showing up the knots in, the ravelled skeins of our
neighbours. Much more to the purpose is it to ask if we possess any clue
of our own which may guide us among these entanglements. And by way of
a beginning, let us ask ourselves--What is education? Above all things,
what is our ideal of a thoroughly liberal education?--of that education
which, if we could begin life again, we would give ourselves--of that
education which, if we could mould the fates to our own will, we would
give our children? Well, I know not what may be your conceptions upon
this matter, but I will tell you mine, and I hope I shall find that our
views are not very discrepant.


Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one
of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game
of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary
duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have
a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and
getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a
disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son,
or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a
pawn from a knight?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune,
and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who
are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules
of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is
a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us
being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard
is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules
of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other
side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just,
and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a
mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who
plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing
generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who
plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch [53] has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.
Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel
who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and
I should accept it as an image of human life.

Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in
the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things
and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in
harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less
than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be
tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will
not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of
numbers, upon the other side.

It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing
as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. Suppose that an adult man,
in the full vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the
world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best
might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature
would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the
properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling
him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the man would receive
an education which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and adequate
to his circumstances, though there would be no extras and very few
accomplishments.

And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam or, better still, an
Eve, a new and greater world, that of social and moral phenomena, would
be revealed. Joys and woes, compared with which all others might seem
but faint shadows, would spring from the new relations. Happiness and
sorrow would take the place of the coarser monitors, pleasure and pain;
but conduct would still be shaped by the observation of the natural
consequences of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature
of man.

To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And
then, long before we were susceptible of any other modes of instruction,
Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its
educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with
Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross
disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past
for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as fresh
as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who
has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patient
education of us in that great university, the universe, of which we are
all members--Nature having no Test-Acts.[54]

Those who take honours in Nature's university, who learn the laws which
govern men and things and obey them, are the really great and successful
men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the "Poll,"[55] who
pick up just enough to get through without much discredit. Those who
won't learn at all are plucked;[56] and then you can't come up again.
Nature's pluck means extermination.

Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature
is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long
ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and
wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful
disobedience--incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime.
Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first;
but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your
ears are boxed.

The object of what we commonly call education--that education in which
man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education--is
to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to
receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with
wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of
her pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all
artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education.
And a liberal education is an artificial education which has not only
prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural
laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards,
which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.

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 passions 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 mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.




ON A PIECE OF CHALK [57]


If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the
diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance
almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as
"chalk."

Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well-sinker
might carry his shaft down many hundred feet without coming to the end
of the chalk; and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared away
the face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high
cliffs are often wholly formed of the same material. Northward, the
chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it appears
abruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into
the Needles of the Isle of Wight;[58] while on the shores of Kent it
supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name
of Albion.

Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band
of white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be followed
diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head
[59] in Yorkshire--a distance of over two hundred and eighty miles as
the crow flies.

From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and the Channel, on the
South, the chalk is largely hidden by other deposits; but, except in the
Weald [60] of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all
the south-eastern counties.

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than a
thousand feet, the English chalk must be admitted to be a mass of
considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant
portion of the whole area occupied by the chalk formation of the globe,
which has precisely the same general characters as ours, and is found
in detached patches, some less, and others more extensive, than the
English.

Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland; it stretches over a large part of
France,--the chalk which underlies Paris being, in fact, a continuation
of that of the London basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe,
and extends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it appears in the
Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea
of Aral, in Central Asia.

If all the points at which true chalk occurs were circumscribed, they
would lie within an irregular oval about three thousand miles in long
diameter--the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, and
would many times exceed that of the largest existing inland sea--the
Mediterranean.

Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's
crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with the conditions to
which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs.
The undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with sweet-grassed
turf, of our inland chalk country, have a peacefully domestic and
mutton-suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand
or beautiful. But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many
hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in
the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary
cormorant confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk
headlands. And, in the East, chalk has its share in the formation of
some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, such as the Lebanon.


What is this wide-spread component of the surface of the earth? and
whence did it come?

You may think this no very hopeful inquiry. You may not unnaturally
suppose that the attempt to solve such problems as these can lead to
no result, save that of entangling the inquirer in vague speculations,
incapable of refutation and of verification.

If such were really the case, I should have selected some other subject
than a "piece of chalk" for my discourse. But, in truth, after much
deliberation, I have been unable to think of any topic which would so
well enable me to lead you to see how solid is the foundation upon which
some of the most startling conclusions of physical science rest.

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few
passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming
mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the
truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to
enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight.

Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound
significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that
the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every
carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all
other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its
ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception
of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most
learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant
of those of Nature.

The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as
Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has
to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out
together.

We all know that if we "burn" chalk the result is quicklime. Chalk, in
fact, is a compound of carbonic acid gas, and lime, and when you make it
very hot the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left.

By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not see the
carbonic acid. If, on the other hand, you were to powder a little chalk
and drop it into a good deal of strong vinegar, there would be a great
bubbling and fizzing, and, finally, a clear liquid, in which no sign of
chalk would appear. Here you see the carbonic acid in the bubbles; the
lime, dissolved in the vinegar, vanishes from sight. There are a
great many other ways of showing that chalk is essentially nothing but
carbonic acid and quicklime. Chemists enunciate the result of all the
experiments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly
composed of "carbonate of lime."

It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of this fact, though
it may not seem to help us very far towards what we seek. For carbonate
of lime is a widely spread substance, and is met with under very various
conditions. All sorts of limestones are composed of more or less pure
carbonate of lime. The crust which is often deposited by waters which
have drained through limestone rocks, in the form of what are called
stalagmites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or, to take a more
familiar example, the fur on the inside of a tea-kettle is carbonate of
lime; and, for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk
might be a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth-kettle,
which is kept pretty hot below.

Let us try another method of making the chalk tell us its own history.
To the unassisted eye chalk looks simply like a very loose and open kind
of stone. But it is possible to grind a slice of chalk down so thin that
you can see through it--until it is thin enough, in fact, to be examined
with any magnifying power that may be thought desirable. A thin slice of
the fur of a kettle might be made in the same way. If it were examined
microscopically, it would show itself to be a more or less distinctly
laminated mineral substance and nothing more.

But the slice of chalk presents a totally different appearance when
placed under the microscope. The general mass of it is made up of very
minute granules; but, imbedded in this matrix, are innumerable bodies,
some smaller and some larger, but, on a rough average, not more than
a hundredth of an inch in diameter, having a well-defined shape and
structure. A cubic inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds
of thousands of these bodies, compacted together with incalculable
millions of the granules.

The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of the manner
in which the components of the chalk are arranged, and of their relative
proportions. But, by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water and
then pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different
degrees of fineness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be
pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic
examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining
the views obtained in these various methods, each of the rounded bodies
may be proved to be a beautifully constructed calcareous fabric, made
up of a number of chambers, communicating freely with one another. The
chambered bodies are of various forms. One of the commonest is something
like a badly grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly
globular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called
Globigerina, and some specimens of chalk consist of little else than
Globigerina and granules.

Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It is the spoor of
the game we are tracking. If we can learn what it is and what are the
conditions of its existence, we shall see our way to the origin and past
history of the chalk.

A suggestion which may naturally enough present itself is, that these
curious bodies are the result of some process of aggregation which has
taken place in the carbonate of lime; that, just as in winter, the rime
on our windows simulates the most delicate and elegantly arborescent
foliage--proving that the mere mineral water may, under certain
conditions, assume the outward form of organic bodies--so this mineral
substance, carbonate of lime, hidden away in the bowels of the earth,
has taken the shape of these chambered bodies. I am not raising a merely
fanciful and unreal objection. Very learned men, in former days, have
even entertained the notion that all the formed things found in rocks
are of this nature; and if no such conception is at present held to be
admissible, it is because long and varied experience has now shown
that mineral matter never does assume the form and structure we find
in fossils. If any one were to try to persuade you that an oyster-shell
(which is also chiefly composed of carbonate of lime) had crystallized
out of sea-water, I suppose you would laugh at the absurdity. Your
laughter would be justified by the fact that all experience tends to
show that oyster-shells are formed by the agency of oysters, and in no
other way. And if there were no better reasons, we should be justified,
on like grounds, in believing that Globigerina is not the product of
anything but vital activity.

Happily, however, better evidence in proof of the organic nature of the
Globigerinae than that of analogy is forthcoming. It so happens that
calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the Globigerinae of the chalk,
are being formed, at the present moment, by minute living creatures,
which flourish in multitudes, literally more numerous than the sands of
the sea-shore, over a large extent of that part of the earth's surface
which is covered by the ocean.

The history of the discovery of these living Globigerinae, and of the
part which they play in rock building, is singular enough. It is a
discovery which, like others of no less scientific importance, has
arisen, incidentally, out of work devoted to very different and
exceedingly practical interests.

When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned to look out for
shoals and rocks; and the more the burthen of their ships increased,
the more imperatively necessary it became for sailors to ascertain with
precision the depths of the waters they traversed. Out of this
necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding line; and, ultimately,
marine-surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of
the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.

At the same time, it became desirable to ascertain and to indicate the
nature of the sea-bottom, since this circumstance greatly affects its
goodness as holding ground for anchors. Some ingenious tar, whose name
deserves a better fate than the oblivion into which it has fallen,
attained this object by "arming" the bottom of the lead with a lump of
grease, to which more or less of the sand or mud, or broken shells, as
the case might be, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But, however
well adapted such an apparatus might be for rough nautical purposes,
scientific accuracy could not be expected from the armed lead, and to
remedy its defects (especially when applied to sounding in great depths)
Lieut. Brooke,[61] of the American Navy, some years ago invented a most
ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial
layer of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth
to which the lead descends.

In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of the North
Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at a depth of more than
ten thousand feet, or two miles, by the help of this sounding apparatus.
The specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg [62] of Berlin,
and to Bailey of West Point,[63] and those able microscopists found
that this deep-sea mud was almost entirely composed of the skeletons of
living organisms--the greater proportion of these being just like the
Globigerinae already known to occur in the chalk.

Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the interests of
science, but Lieut. Brooke's method of sounding acquired a high
commercial value, when the enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable
[64] between this country and the United States was undertaken. For it
became a matter of immense importance to know, not only the depth of the
sea over the whole line along which the cable was to be laid, but the
exact nature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting
or fraying the strands of that costly rope. The Admiralty consequently
ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain
the depth over the whole line of the cable, and to bring back specimens
of the bottom. In former days, such a command as this might have sounded
very much like one of the impossible things which the young prince in
the Fairy Tales is ordered to do before he can obtain the hand of the
Princess. However, in the months of June and July, 1857, my friend
performed the task assigned to him with great expedition and precision
without, so far as I know, having met with any reward of that kind.
The specimens of Atlantic mud which he procured were sent to me to be
examined and reported upon.*

     * See Appendix to Captain Dayman's "Deep-sea Soundings in
     the North Atlantic Ocean, between Ireland and Newfoundland,
     made in H.M.S. Cyclops. Published by order of the Lords
     Commissioners of the Admiralty, 1858." They have since
     formed the subject of an elaborate Memoir by Messrs. Parker
     and Jones, published in the Philosophical Transactions for
     1865.

The result of all these operations is, that we know the contours and the
nature of the surface-soil covered by the North Atlantic, for a distance
of seventeen hundred miles from east to west, as well as we know that of
any part of the dry land.

It is a prodigious plain--one of the widest and most even plains in the
world. If the sea were drained off, you might drive a wagon all the
way from Valentia, on the west coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay, in
Newfoundland. And, except upon one sharp incline about two hundred miles
from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would even be necessary to
put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long
route. From Valentia the road would lie down-hill for about 200 miles
to the point at which the bottom is now covered by 1700 fathoms of
sea-water. Then would come the central plain, more than a thousand
miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be hardly
perceptible, though the depth of water upon it now varies from 10,000
to 15,000 feet; and there are places in which Mont Blanc might be sunk
without showing its peak above water. Beyond this, the ascent on the
American side commences, and gradually leads, for about 300 miles, to
the Newfoundland shore.

Almost the whole of the bottom of this central plain (which extends for
many hundred miles in a north and south direction) is covered by a fine
mud, which, when brought to the surface, dries into a greyish-white
friable substance. You can write with this on a blackboard, if you are
so inclined; and, to the eye, it is quite like very soft, greyish chalk.
Examined chemically, it proves to be composed almost wholly of carbonate
of lime; and if you make a section of it, in the same way as that of the
piece of chalk was made, and view it with the microscope, it presents
innumerable Globigerinae embedded in a granular matrix.

Thus this deep-sea mud is substantially chalk. I say substantially,
because there are a good many minor differences; but as these have no
bearing on the question immediately before us,--which is the nature of
the Globigerinae of the chalk,--it is unnecessary to speak of them.

Globigerinae of every size, from the smallest to the largest, are
associated together in the Atlantic mud, and the chambers of many are
filled by a soft animal matter. This soft substance is, in fact, the
remains of the creature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather
skeleton, owes its existence--and which is an animal of the simplest
imaginable description. It is, in fact, a mere particle of living jelly,
without defined parts of any kind--without a mouth, nerves, muscles,
or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary
observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its
surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs.
Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher
animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing and multiplying;
of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime
which is dissolved in sea-water; and of building up that substance into
a skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which can be imitated by
no other known agency.

The notion that animals can live and flourish in the sea, at the vast
depths from which apparently living Globigerinae have been brought
up, does not agree very well with our usual conceptions respecting the
conditions of animal life; and it is not so absolutely impossible as
it might at first appear to be, that the Globigerinae of the Atlantic
sea-bottom do not live and die where they are found.

As I have mentioned, the soundings from the great Atlantic plain are
almost entirely made up of Globigerinae, with the granules which
have been mentioned and some few other calcareous shells; but a small
percentage of the chalky mud--perhaps at most some five per cent of
it--is of a different nature, and consists of shells and skeletons
composed of silex, or pure flint. These silicious bodies belong partly
to the lowly vegetable organisms which are called Diatomaceae, and
partly to the minute, and extremely simple, animals, termed Radiolaria.
It is quite certain that these creatures do not live at the bottom of
the ocean, but at its surface--where they may be obtained in prodigious
numbers by the use of a properly constructed net. Hence it follows that
these silicious organisms, though they are not heavier than the lightest
dust, must have fallen, in some cases, through fifteen thousand feet of
water, before they reached their final resting-place on the ocean floor.
And, considering how large a surface these bodies expose in proportion
to their weight, it is probable that they occupy a great length of time
in making their burial journey from the surface of the Atlantic to the
bottom.

But if the Radiolaria and Diatoms are thus rained upon the bottom of the
sea, from the superficial layer of its waters in which they pass their
lives, it is obviously possible that the Globigerinae may be similarly
derived; and if they were so, it would be much more easy to
understand how they obtain their supply of food than it is at present.
Nevertheless, the positive and negative evidence all points the other
way. The skeletons of the full-grown, deep-sea Globigerinae are so
remarkably solid and heavy in proportion to their surface as to seem
little fitted for floating; and, as a matter of fact, they are not to be
found along with the Diatoms and Radiolaria, in the uppermost stratum of
the open ocean.

It has been observed, again, that the abundance of Globigerinae, in
proportion to other organisms, of like kind, increases with the depth
of the sea; and that deep-water Globigerinae are larger than those
which live in shallower parts of the sea; and such facts negative the
supposition that these organisms have been swept by currents from the
shallows into the deeps of the Atlantic.

It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these wonderful creatures
live and die at the depths in which they are found.

However, the important points for us are, that the living Globigerinae
are exclusively marine animals, the skeletons of which abound at the
bottom of deep seas; and that there is not a shadow of reason for
believing that the habits of the Globigerinae of the chalk differed from
those of the existing species. But if this be true, there is no escaping
the conclusion that the chalk itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep
sea.

In working over the soundings collected by Captain Dayman, I was
surprised to find that many of what I have called the "granules" of that
mud, were not, as one might have been tempted to think at first, the
mere powder and waste of Globigerinae, but that they had a definite form
and size. I termed these bodies "coccoliths," and doubted their
organic nature. Dr. Wallich [65] verified my observation, and added the
interesting discovery, that, not unfrequently, bodies similar to these
"coccoliths" were aggregated together into spheroids, which he termed
"coccospheres." So far as we knew, these bodies, the nature of which
is extremely puzzling and problematical, were peculiar to the Atlantic
soundings.

But, a few years ago, Mr. Sorby,[66] in making a careful examination
of the chalk by means of thin sections and otherwise, observed, as
Ehrenberg had done before him, that much of its granular basis possesses
a definite form. Comparing these formed particles with those in the
Atlantic soundings, he found the two to be identical; and thus proved
that the chalk, like the soundings, contains these mysterious
coccoliths and coccospheres. Here was a further and a most interesting
confirmation, from internal evidence, of the essential identity of
the chalk with modern deep-sea mud. Globigerinae, coccoliths, and
coccospheres are round as the chief constituents of both, and testify
to the general similarity of the conditions under which both have been
formed.

The evidence furnished by the hewing, facing, and superposition of the
stones of the Pyramids, that these structures were built by men, has
no greater weight than the evidence that the chalk was built by
Globigerinae; and the belief that those ancient pyramid-builders were
terrestrial and air-breathing creatures like ourselves, is it not better
based than the conviction that the chalk-makers lived in the sea?

But as our belief in the building of the Pyramids by men is not only
grounded on the internal evidences afforded by these structures, but
gathers strength from multitudinous collateral proofs, and is clinched
by the total absence of any reason for a contrary belief; so the
evidence drawn from the Globigerinae that the chalk is an ancient
sea-bottom, is fortified by innumerable independent lines of evidence;
and our belief in the truth of the conclusion to which all positive
testimony tends, receives the like negative justification from the fact
that no other hypothesis has a shadow of foundation.

It may be worth while briefly to consider a few of these collateral
proofs that the chalk was deposited at the bottom of the sea.

The great mass of the chalk is composed, as we have seen, of the
skeletons of Globigerinae, and other simple organisms, imbedded in
granular matter. Here and there, however, this hardened mud of the
ancient sea reveals the remains of higher animals which have lived and
died, and left their hard parts in the mud, just as the oysters die and
leave their shells behind them, in the mud of the present seas.

There are, at the present day, certain groups of animals which are never
found in fresh waters, being unable to live anywhere but in the sea.
Such are the corals; those corallines which are called Polycoa; those
creatures which fabricate the lamp-shells, and are called Brachiopoda;
the pearly Nautilus, and all animals allied to it; and all the forms of
sea-urchins and star-fishes.

Not only are all these creatures confined to salt water at the present
day; but, so far as our records of the past go, the conditions of their
existence have been the same: hence, their occurrence in any deposit is
as strong evidence as can be obtained, that that deposit was formed in
the sea. Now the remains of animals of all the kinds which have been
enumerated, occur in the chalk, in greater or less abundance; while not
one of those forms of shell-fish which are characteristic of fresh water
has yet been observed in it.

When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct
species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the
chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now met
with only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any
one of them inhabited fresh water--the collateral evidence that the
chalk represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the
proof derived from the nature of the chalk itself. I think you will now
allow that I did not overstate my case when I asserted that we have
as strong grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry land, at
present occupied by the chalk, was once at the bottom of the sea, as we
have for any matter of history whatever; while there is no justification
for any other belief.

No less certain it is that the time during which the countries we now
call south-east England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia,
Syria, were more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was of
considerable duration.

We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a thousand
feet thick. I think you will agree with me, that it must have taken
some time for the skeletons of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch in
diameter to heap up such a mass as that. I have said that throughout the
thickness of the chalk the remains of other animals are scattered.
These remains are often in the most exquisite state of preservation.
The valves of the shell-fishes are commonly adherent; the long spines
of some of the sea-urchins, which would be detached by the smallest
jar, often remain in their places. In a word, it is certain that these
animals have lived and died when the place which they now occupy was
the surface of as much of the chalk as had then been deposited; and that
each has been covered up by the layer of Globigerina mud, upon which the
creatures imbedded a little higher up have, in like manner, lived and
died. But some of these remains prove the existence of reptiles of vast
size in the chalk sea. These lived their time, and had their ancestors
and descendants, which assuredly implies time, reptiles being of slow
growth.

There is more curious evidence, again, that the process of covering up,
or, in other words, the deposit of Globigerina skeletons, did not go on
very fast. It is demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea might
die, that its skeleton might lie uncovered upon the sea-bottom long
enough to lose all its outward coverings and appendages by putrefaction;
and that, after this had happened, another animal might attach itself
to the dead and naked skeleton, might grow to maturity, and might itself
die before the calcareous mud had buried the whole.

Cases of this kind are admirably described by Sir Charles Lyell.[67]
He speaks of the frequency with which geologists find in the chalk a
fossilized sea-urchin, to which is attached the lower valve of a Crania.
This is a kind of shell-fish, with a shell composed of two pieces, of
which, as in the oyster, one is fixed and the other free.

"The upper valve is almost invariably wanting, though occasionally found
in a perfect state of preservation in the white chalk at some distance.
In this case, we see clearly that the sea-urchin first lived from youth
to age, then died and lost its spines, which were carried away. Then the
young Crania adhered to the bared shell, grew and perished in its turn;
after which, the upper valve was separated from the lower, before the
Echinus [68] became enveloped in chalky mud."

A specimen in the Museum of Practical Geology, in London, still further
prolongs the period which must have elapsed between the death of the
sea-urchin, and its burial by the Globigerinae. For the outward face of
the valve of a Crania, which is attached to a sea-urchin (Micraster),
is itself overrun by an incrusting coralline, which spreads thence over
more or less of the surface of the sea-urchin. It follows that, after
the upper valve of the Crania fell off, the surface of the attached
valve must have remained exposed long enough to allow of the growth of
the whole corraline, since corallines do not live imbedded in mud.

The progress of knowledge may, one day, enable us to deduce from such
facts as these the maximum rate at which the chalk can have accumulated,
and thus to arrive at the minimum duration of the chalk period. Suppose
that the valve of the Crania upon which a coralline has fixed itself in
the way just described, is so attached to the sea-urchin that no part of
it is more than an inch above the face upon which the sea-urchin rests.
Then, as the coralline could not have fixed itself, if the Crania had
been covered up with chalk mud, and could not have lived had itself
been so covered it follows, that an inch of chalk mud could not have
accumulated within the time between the death and decay of the soft
parts of the sea-urchin and the growth of the coralline to the full size
which it has attained. If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin;
the attachment, growth to maturity, and decay of the Crania; and the
subsequent attachment and growth of the coralline, took a year (which is
a low estimate enough), the accumulation of the inch of chalk must have
taken more than a year: and the deposit of a thousand feet of chalk
must, consequently, have taken more than twelve thousand years.

The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, a knowledge of the
length of time the Crania and the coralline needed to attain their full
size; and, on this head, precise knowledge is at present wanting. But
there are circumstances which tend to show, that nothing like an inch of
chalk has accumulated during the life of a Crania; and, on any probable
estimate of the length of that life, the chalk period must have had a
much longer duration than that thus roughly assigned to it.


Thus, not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud of an ancient
sea-bottom; but it is no less certain, that the chalk sea existed
during an extremely long period, though we may not be prepared to give
a precise estimate of the length of that period in years. The relative
duration is clear, though the absolute duration may not be definable.
The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk
sea began, or ended, its existence, is baffled by difficulties of
the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be
determined with as great ease and certainty as the long duration of that
epoch.

You will have heard of the interesting discoveries recently made, in
various parts of Western Europe, of flint implements, obviously worked
into shape by human hands, under circumstances which show conclusively
that man is a very ancient denizen of these regions.

It has been proved that the old populations of Europe, whose existence
has been revealed to us in this way, consisted of savages, such as the
Esquimaux are now; that, in the country which is now France, they hunted
the reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the
bison. The physical geography of France was in those days different from
what it is now--the river Somme,[69] for instance, having cut its bed
a hundred feet deeper between that time and this; and, it is probable,
that the climate was more like that of Canada or Siberia, than that of
Western Europe.

The existence of these people is forgotten even in the traditions of
the oldest historical nations. The name and fame of them had utterly
vanished until a few years back; and the amount of physical change which
has been effected since their day, renders it more than probable that,
venerable as are some of the historical nations, the workers of the
chipped flints of Hoxne or of Amiens [70] are to them, as they are to
us, in point of antiquity.

But, if we assign to these hoar relics of long-vanished generations of
men the greatest age that can possibly be claimed for them, they are
not older than the drift, or boulder clay, which, in comparison with the
chalk, is but a very juvenile deposit. You need go no further than your
own sea-board for evidence of this fact. At one of the most charming
spots on the coast of Norfolk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay
forming a vast mass, which lies upon the chalk, and must consequently
have come into existence after it. Huge boulders of chalk are, in fact,
included in the clay, and have evidently been brought to the position
they now occupy, by the same agency as that which has planted blocks of
syenite from Norway side by side with them.

The chalk, then, is certainly older than the boulder clay. If you ask
how much, I will again take you no further than the same spot upon your
own coasts for evidence. I have spoken of the boulder clay and drift as
resting upon the chalk. That is not strictly true. Interposed between
the chalk and the drift is a comparatively insignificant layer,
containing vegetable matter. But that layer tells a wonderful history.
It is full of stumps of trees standing as they grew. Fir-trees are there
with their cones, and hazel-bushes with their nuts; there stand the
stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and alders. Hence this stratum is
appropriately called the "forest-bed."

It is obvious that the chalk must have been up-heaved and converted into
dry land, before the timber trees could grow upon it. As the boles of
some of these trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is no
less clear that the dry land this formed remained in the same condition
for long ages. And not only do the remains of stately oaks and
well-grown firs testify to the duration of this condition of things,
but additional evidence to the same effect is afforded by the abundant
remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotomuses and other great wild
beasts, which it has yielded to the zealous search of such men as the
Rev. Mr. Gunn.[71]

When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you
that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and
these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed
is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are
as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of the
tree-stumps.

Thus there is a writing upon the walls of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso
runs may read it. It tells us, with an authority which cannot be
impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and
remained dry land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the
great game whose spoils have rejoiced your geologists. How long it
remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time
[72] brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land,
with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden
away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank
gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge
masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now
restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered
among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things
endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved
glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once
more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant;
and at length what we call the history of England dawned.

Thus you have within the limits of your own county, proof that the chalk
can justly claim a very much greater antiquity than even the oldest
physical traces of mankind. But we may go further and demonstrate, by
evidence of the same authority as that which testifies to the existence
of the father of men, that the chalk is vastly older than Adam himself.

The Book of Genesis informs us that Adam, immediately upon his creation,
and before the appearance of Eve, was placed in the Garden of Eden.
The problem of the geographical position of Eden has greatly vexed
the spirits of the learned in such matters, but there is one point
respecting which, so far as I know, no commentator has ever raised a
doubt. This is, that of the four rivers which are said to run out of it,
Euphrates and Hiddekel [73] are identical with the rivers now known by
the names of Euphrates and Tigris.

But the whole country in which these mighty rivers take their origin,
and through which they run, is composed of rocks which are either of the
same age as the chalk, or of later date. So that the chalk must not only
have been formed, but, after its formation, the time required for the
deposit of these later rocks, and for their upheaval into dry land, must
have elapsed, before the smallest brook which feeds the swift stream of
"the great river, the river of Babylon,"[74] began to flow.


Thus, evidence which cannot be rebutted, and which need not be
strengthened, though if time permitted I might indefinitely increase its
quantity, compels you to believe that the earth, from the time of the
chalk to the present day, has been the theatre of a series of changes as
vast in their amount, as they were slow in their progress. The area
on which we stand has been first sea and then land, for at least four
alternations; and has remained in each of these conditions for a period
of great length.

Nor have these wonderful metamorphoses of sea into land, and of land
into sea, been confined to one corner of England. During the chalk
period, or "cretaceous epoch," not one of the present great physical
features of the globe was in existence. Our great mountain ranges,
Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, have all been upheaved since the chalk
was deposited, and the cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and
Ararat.

All this is certain, because rocks of cretaceous, or still later, date
have shared in the elevatory movements which gave rise to these mountain
chains; and may be found perched up, in some cases, many thousand feet
high upon their flanks. And evidence of equal cogency demonstrates that,
though, in Norfolk, the forest-bed rests directly upon the chalk, yet
it does so, not because the period at which the forest grew immediately
followed that at which the chalk was formed, but because an immense
lapse of time, represented elsewhere by thousands of feet of rock, is
not indicated at Cromer.

I must ask you to believe that there is no less conclusive proof that a
still more prolonged succession of similar changes occurred, before the
chalk was deposited. Nor have we any reason to think that the first term
in the series of these changes is known. The oldest sea-beds preserved
to us are sands, and mud, and pebbles, the wear and tear of rocks which
were formed in still older oceans.

But, great as is the magnitude of these physical changes of the world,
they have been accompanied by a no less striking series of modifications
in its living inhabitants.

All the great classes of animals, beasts of the field, fowls of the air,
creeping things, and things which dwell in the waters, flourished upon
the globe long ages before the chalk was deposited. Very few, however,
if any, of these ancient forms of animal life were identical with those
which now live. Certainly not one of the higher animals was of the same
species as any of those now in existence. The beasts of the field, in
the days before the chalk, were not our beasts of the field, nor the
fowls of the air such as those which the eye of men has seen flying,
unless his antiquity dates infinitely further back than we at present
surmise. If we could be carried back into those times, we should be as
one suddenly set down in Australia before it was colonized. We should
see mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, snails, and the like,
clearly recognisable as such, and yet not one of them would be just the
same as those with which we are familiar, and many would be extremely
different.

From that time to the present, the population of the world has undergone
slow and gradual, but incessant changes. There has been no grand
catastrophe--no destroyer has swept away the forms of life of one
period, and replaced them by a totally new creation; but one species
has vanished and another has taken its place; creatures of one type of
structure have diminished, those of another have increased, as time has
passed on. And thus, while the differences between the living creatures
of the time before the chalk and those of the present day appear
startling, if placed side by side, we are led from one to the other by
the most gradual progress, if we follow the course of Nature through
the whole series of those relics of her operations which she has left
behind.

And it is by the population of the chalk sea that the ancient and the
modern inhabitants of the world are most completely connected. The
groups which are dying out flourish, side by side, with the groups which
are now the dominant forms of life.

Thus the chalk contains remains of those strange flying and swimming
reptiles, the pterodactyl, the ichthyosaurus, and the plesiosaurus,
which are found in no later deposits, but abounded in preceding ages.
The chambered shells called ammonites and belemnites, which are so
characteristic of the period preceding the cretaceous, in like manner
die with it.

But, amongst these fading remainders of a previous state of things,
are some very modern forms of life, looking like Yankee pedlars among
a tribe of Red Indians. Crocodiles of modern type appear; bony fishes,
many of them very similar to existing species almost supplant the forms
of fish which predominate in more ancient seas; and many kinds of living
shellfish first become known to us in the chalk. The vegetation acquires
a modern aspect. A few living animals are not even distinguishable as
species, from those which existed at that remote epoch. The Globigerina
of the present day, for example, is not different specifically from that
of the chalk; and the same may be said of many other Foraminifera. I
think it probable that critical and unprejudiced examination will show
that more than one species of much higher animals have had a similar
longevity; but the only example, which I can at present give confidently
is the snake's-head lamp-shell (Terebratulina caput serpentis), which
lives in our English seas and abounded (as Terebratulina striata of
authors) in the chalk.

The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before
the pedigree of this insignificant shell-fish. We Englishmen are proud
to have an ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings. The
ancestors of Terebratulina caput serpentis may have been present at a
battle of Ichthyosauria in that part of the sea which, when the chalk
was forming, flowed over the site of Hastings. While all around has
changed, this Terebratulina has peacefully propagated its species from
generation to generation, and stands to this day, as a living testimony
to the continuity of the present with the past history of the globe.


Up to this moment I have stated, so far as I know, nothing but
well-authenticated facts, and the immediate conclusions which they force
upon the mind.

But the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts
and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge of the remoter
links in the chain of causation.

Taking the many changes of any given spot of the earth's surface, from
sea to land and from land to sea, as an established fact, we cannot
refrain from asking ourselves how these changes have occurred. And when
we have explained them--as they must be explained--by the alternate slow
movements of elevation and depression which have affected the crust of
the earth, we go still further back, and ask, Why these movements?

I am not certain that any one can give you a satisfactory answer to that
question. Assuredly I cannot. All that can be said, for certain, is,
that such movements are part of the ordinary course of nature, inasmuch
as they are going on at the present time. Direct proof may be given,
that some parts of the land of the northern hemisphere are at this
moment insensibly rising and others insensibly sinking; and there is
indirect, but perfectly satisfactory, proof, that an enormous area now
covered by the Pacific has been deepened thousands of feet, since the
present inhabitants of that sea came into existence.

Thus there is not a shadow of a reason for believing that the physical
changes of the globe, in past times have been effected by other than
natural causes.

Is there any more reason for believing that the concomitant
modifications in the forms of the living inhabitants of the globe have
been brought about in other ways?

Before attempting to answer this question, let us try to form a distinct
mental picture of what has happened, in some special case.

The crocodiles are animals which, as a group, have a very vast
antiquity. They abounded ages before the chalk was deposited; they
throng the rivers in warm climates, at the present day. There is a
difference in the form of the joints of the back-bone, and in some minor
particulars, between the crocodiles of the present epoch and those which
lived before the chalk; but in the cretaceous epoch, as I have already
mentioned, the crocodiles had assumed the modern type of structure.
Notwithstanding this, the crocodiles of the chalk are not identically
the same as those which lived in the times called "older tertiary,"
which succeeded the cretaceous epoch; and the crocodiles of the older
tertiaries are not identical with those of the newer tertiaries, nor are
these identical with existing forms. I leave open the question whether
particular species may have lived on from epoch to epoch. But each
epoch has had its peculiar crocodiles; though all, since the chalk, have
belonged to the modern type, and differ simply in their proportions, and
in such structural particulars as are discernible only to trained eyes.

How is the existence of this long succession of different species of
crocodiles to be accounted for?

Only two suppositions seem to be open to us--Either each species of
crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some
pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes.

Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for
believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of
crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time. Science gives no
countenance to such a wild fancy; nor can even the perverse ingenuity
of a commentator pretend to discover this sense, in the simple words
in which the writer of Genesis records the proceedings of the fifth and
sixth days of the Creation.

On the other hand, I see no good reason for doubting the necessary
alternative, that all these varied species have been evolved from
pre-existing crocodilian forms, by the operation of causes as completely
a part of the common order of nature, as those which have effected the
changes of the inorganic world.

Few will venture to affirm that the reasoning which applies to
crocodiles loses its force among other animals, or among plants. If one
series of species has come into existence by the operation of natural
causes, it seems folly to deny that all may have arisen in the same way.


A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit
of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning
hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that
this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been
the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise
brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays,
penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken
some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without
haste, but without rest"[75] of the land and sea, as in the endless
variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed
nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by
the substance of the universe.




THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION [76]


I know quite well that launching myself into this discussion [77] is a
very dangerous operation; that it is a very large subject, and one
which is difficult to deal with, however much I may trespass upon
your patience in the time allotted to me. But the discussion is so
fundamental, it is so completely impossible to make up one's mind on
these matters until one has settled the question, that I will even
venture to make the experiment. A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher
of a former age--I mean Francis Bacon [78]--said that truth came out
of error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion. There is a
wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in this world, the
best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you
will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and
wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are
absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of
these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against
a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble
myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say,
but at any rate I hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be
able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train of
thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not.

I take it that the whole object of education is, in the first place,
to train the faculties of the young in such a manner as to give their
possessors the best chance of being happy [79] and useful in their
generation; and, in the second place, to furnish them with the most
important portions of that immense capitalised experience of the human
race which we call knowledge of various kinds. I am using the term
knowledge in its widest possible sense; and the question is, what
subjects to select by training and discipline, in which the object I
have just defined may be best attained.

I must call your attention further to this fact, that all the subjects
of our thoughts--all feelings and propositions (leaving aside our
sensations as the mere materials and occasions of thinking and feeling),
all our mental furniture--may be classified under one of two heads--as
either within the province of the intellect, something that can be put
into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the province
of feeling, or that which, before the name was defiled, was called
the aesthetic side of our nature, and which can neither be proved nor
disproved, but only felt and known.

According to the classification which I have put before you, then, the
subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two groups, matters
of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning
faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of science; and in
the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which
we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all
things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art, in the sense
of the subject-matter of the aesthetic faculty. So that we are shut
up to this--that the business of education is, in the first place, to
provide the young with the means and the habit of observation; and,
secondly, to supply the subject-matter of knowledge either in the shape
of science or of art, or of both combined.

Now, it is a very remarkable fact--but it is true of most things in this
world--that there is hardly anything one-sided, or of one nature; and
it is not immediately obvious what of the things that interest us may be
regarded as pure science, and what may be regarded as pure art. It may
be that there are some peculiarly constituted persons who, before they
have advanced far into the depths of geometry, find artistic beauty
about it; but, taking the generality of mankind, I think it may be
said that, when they begin to learn mathematics, their whole souls
are absorbed in tracing the connection between the premisses and the
conclusion, and that to them geometry is pure science. So I think it
may be said that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the other
hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there
is no proposition involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an
arabesque, or a "harmony in grey,"[80] touches none but the aesthetic
faculty. But a great mathematician, and even many persons who are not
great mathematicians, will tell you that they derive immense pleasure
from geometrical reasonings. Everybody knows mathematicians speak of
solutions and problems as "elegant," and they tell you that a certain
mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful, quite lovely." Well, you do not
see it. They do see it, because the intellectual process, the process of
comprehending the reasons symbolised by these figures and these signs,
confers upon them a sort of pleasure, such as an artist has in visual
symmetry. Take a science of which I may speak with more confidence, and
which is the most attractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we
call morphology, which consists in tracing out the unity in variety of
the infinitely diversified structures of animals and plants. I cannot
give you any example of a thorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely
real than a pleasure of this kind--the pleasure which arises in one's
mind when a whole mass of different structures run into one harmony
as the expression of a central law. That is where the province of art
overlays and embraces the province of intellect. And, if I may venture
to express an opinion on such a subject, the great majority of forms of
art are not in the sense what I just now defined them to be--pure
art; but they derive much of their quality from simultaneous and even
unconscious excitement of the intellect.

When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I am so now; and it so
happened that I had the opportunity of hearing much good music. Among
other things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that great old
master, Sebastian Bach. I remember perfectly well--though I knew
nothing about music then, and, I may add, know nothing whatever about it
now--the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in listening, by
the hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is a pleasure which remains with
me, I am glad to think; but, of late years, I have tried to find out
the why and wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the pleasure
derived from musical compositions of this kind is essentially of the
same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are commonly
regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is
exactly the same as in most of my problems in morphology--that you
have the theme in one of the old master's works followed out in all its
endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of unity
in variety. So in painting; what is called "truth to nature" is the
intellectual element coming in, and truth to nature depends entirely
upon the intellectual culture of the person to whom art is addressed. If
you are in Australia, you may get credit for being a good artist--I
mean among the natives--if you can draw a kangaroo after a fashion. But,
among men of higher civilisation, the intellectual knowledge we possess
brings its criticism into our appreciation of works of art, and we are
obliged to satisfy it, as well as the mere sense of beauty in colour and
in outline. And so, the higher the culture and information of those
whom art addresses, the more exact and precise must be what we call its
"truth to nature."

If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works
of literature which may be said to be pure art. A little song of
Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful,
although its intellectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures
is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and the effect
is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great mass of the literature
we esteem is valued, not merely because of having artistic form, but
because of its intellectual content; and the value is the higher the
more precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual content. And,
if you will let me for a moment speak of the very highest forms of
literature, do we not regard them as highest simply because the more we
know the truer they seem, and the more competent we are to appreciate
beauty the more beautiful they are? No man ever understands Shakespeare
until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the reason being
that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest and harmonises
with the ripest and richest experience of the oldest.

I have said this much to draw your attention to what, in my mind, lies
at the root of all this matter, and at the understanding of one another
by the men of science on the one hand, and the men of literature, and
history, and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one order
of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what
topics of education you shall select which will combine all the needful
elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of
food, support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to
appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness
which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is bad,
and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and
dangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral laws.

I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of the question
of the value of purely literary education. Is it good and sufficient, or
is it insufficient and bad? Well, here I venture to say that there are
literary educations and literary educations. If I am to understand
by that term the education that was current in the great majority of
middle-class schools, and upper schools too, in this country when I was
a boy, and which consisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping
boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek
grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making
verses which, had they been English verses, would have been condemned
as abominable doggerel,--if that is what you mean by liberal education,
then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost worthless. My
reason for saying so is not from the point of view of science at all,
but from the point of view of literature. I say the thing professes to
be literary education that is not a literary education at all. It was
not literature at all that was taught, but science in a very bad form.
It is quite obvious that grammar is science and not literature. The
analysis of a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as much a
scientific operation as the analysis of a chemical compound by the help
of the rules of chemical analysis. There is nothing that appeals to the
aesthetic faculty in that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of
my own age, who went through this process, whether they ever had a
conception of art or literature until they obtained it for themselves
after leaving school? Then you may say, "If that is so, if the education
was scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it?" I say, because
although it is a scientific training, it is of the most inadequate and
inappropriate kind. If there is any good at all in scientific education
it is that men should be trained, as I said before, to know things for
themselves at first hand, and that they should understand every step of
the reason of that which they do.

I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that science--philology--of
which grammar is a part and parcel; yet everybody knows that grammar, as
it is usually learned at school, affords no scientific training. It is
taught just as you would teach the rules of chess or draughts. On the
other hand, if I am to understand by a literary education the study
of the literatures of either ancient or modern nations--but especially
those of antiquity, and especially that of ancient Greece; if this
literature is studied, not merely from the point of view of philological
science, and its practical application to the interpretation of texts,
but as an exemplification of and commentary upon the principles of
art; if you look upon the literature of a people as a chapter in the
development of the human mind, if you work out this in a broad spirit,
and with such collateral references to morals and politics, and physical
geography, and the like as are needful to make you comprehend what the
meaning of ancient literature and civilisation is,--then, assuredly,
it affords a splendid and noble education. But I still think it is
susceptible of improvement, and that no man will ever comprehend the
real secret of the difference between the ancient world and our present
time, unless he has learned to see the difference which the late
development of physical science has made between the thought of this day
and the thought of that, and he will never see that difference, unless
he has some practical insight into some branches of physical science;
and you must remember that a literary education such as that which I
have just referred to, is out of the reach of those whose school life is
cut short at sixteen or seventeen.

But, you will say, all this is fault-finding; let us hear what you have
in the way of positive suggestion. Then I am bound to tell you that,
if I could make a clean sweep of everything--I am very glad I cannot
because I might, and probably should, make mistakes,--but if I could
make a clean sweep of everything and start afresh, I should, in the
first place, secure that training of the young in reading and writing,
and in the habit of attention and observation, both to that which is
told them, and that which they see, which everybody agrees to. But in
addition to that, I should make it absolutely necessary for everybody,
for a longer or shorter period, to learn to draw. Now, you may say,
there are some people who cannot draw, however much they may be taught.
I deny that in toto, because I never yet met with anybody who could not
learn to write. Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the
same attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, depend upon
it, there is nobody who cannot be made to draw, more or less well.
Do not misapprehend me. I do not say for one moment you would make an
artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You may improve
the natural faculty in that direction, but you cannot make it; but you
can teach simple drawing, and you will find it an implement of learning
of extreme value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated, because
it gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy,
which are the two things in which all mankind are more deficient than in
any other mental quality whatever. The whole of my life has been spent
in trying to give my proper attention to things and to be accurate, and
I have not succeeded as well as I could wish; and other people, I am
afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit too
early, and I consider there is nothing of so great a value as the habit
of drawing, to secure those two desirable ends.

Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scientific or aesthetic, of
education, and I should naturally have no question at all about teaching
the elements of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a
practical manner; but among scientific topics, using the word scientific
in the broadest sense, I would also include the elements of the theory
of morals and of that of political and social life, which, strangely
enough, it never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I would
have the history of our own country, and of all the influences which
have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not as
a mere chronicle of reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the
development of the race, and the history of civilisation.

Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and discipline, we have happily
in the English language one of the most magnificent storehouses of
artistic beauty and of models of literary excellence which exists in
the world at the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it here,
that if a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of
his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes,[81] and
Bishop Berkeley,[82] to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I
say, if he cannot get it out of those writers he cannot get it out of
anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time
of every English child to the careful study of the models of English
writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is
still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that
language with precision, with force, and with art. I fancy we are almost
the only nation in the world who seem to think that composition comes
by nature. The French attend to their own language, the Germans study
theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their while.
Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketching,
translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the modern world.
It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but if you don't
happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good a
translation of it as we have recently been furnished with in prose.[83]
You won't get all you would get from the original, but you may get a
great deal; and to refuse to know this great deal because you cannot get
all, seems to be as sensible as for a hungry man to refuse bread because
he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add instruction in either
music or painting, or, if the child should be so unhappy, as sometimes
happens, as to have no faculty for either of those, and no possibility
of doing anything in any artistic sense with them, then I would see what
could be done with literature alone; but I would provide, in the fullest
sense, for the development of the aesthetic side of the mind. In my
judgment, those are all the essentials of education for an English
child. With that outfit, such as it might be made in the time given
to education which is within the reach of nine-tenths of the
population--with that outfit, an Englishman, within the limits of
English life, is fitted to go anywhere, to occupy the highest positions,
to fill the highest offices of the State, and to become distinguished
in practical pursuits, in science, or in art. For, if he have the
opportunity to learn all those things, and have his mind disciplined
in the various directions the teaching of those topics would have
necessitated, then, assuredly, he will be able to pick up, on his road
through life, all the rest of the intellectual baggage he wants.

If the educational time at our disposition were sufficient, there
are one or two things I would add to those I have just now called the
essentials; and perhaps you will be surprised to hear, though I hope you
will not, that I should add, not more science, but one, or, if possible,
two languages. The knowledge of some other language than one's own is,
in fact, of singular intellectual value. Many of the faults and mistakes
of the ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew
no language but their own, and were often led into confusing the symbol
with the thought which it embodied. I think it is Locke [84] who says
that one-half of the mistakes of philosophers have arisen from questions
about words; and one of the safest ways of delivering yourself from the
bondage of words is, to know how ideas look in words to which you are
not accustomed. That is one reason for the study of language; another
reason is, that it opens new fields in art and in science. Another is
the practical value of such knowledge; and yet another is this, that
if your languages are properly chosen, from the time of learning the
additional languages you will know your own language better than ever
you did. So, I say, if the time given to education permits, add Latin
and German. Latin, because it is the key to nearly one-half of English
and to all the Romance languages; and German, because it is the key to
almost all the remainder of English, and helps you to understand a
race from whom most of us have sprung, and who have a character and
a literature of a fateful force in the history of the world, such as
probably has been allotted to those of no other people, except the Jews,
the Greeks, and ourselves. Beyond these, the essential and the eminently
desirable elements of all education, let each man take up his special
line--the historian devote himself to his history, the man of science
to his science, the man of letters to his culture of that kind, and the
artist to his special pursuit.


Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more than this: Franciscus
Bacon sic cogitavit;[85] let "sic cogitavi" be the epilogue to what I
have ventured to address to you to-night.




THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION [86]


The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of
the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode
at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and
exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of
difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those
of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of
a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the
operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis
by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that
the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other,
differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but
the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and
of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.

You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar
example. You have all heard it repeated, I dare say, that men of science
work by means of induction and deduction, and that by the help of these
operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from Nature certain other
things, which are called natural laws, and causes, and that out of
these, by some cunning skill of their own, they build up hypotheses and
theories. And it is imagined by many, that the operations of the common
mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and that they
have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship to the craft.
To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of
science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but
if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are
quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus [87] are being used
by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.

There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's plays,[88] where the
author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he
had been talking prose during the whole of his life. In the same way, I
trust, that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on
the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive
and deductive philosophy during the same period. Probably there is not
one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in
motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though
differing of course in degree, as that which a scientific man goes
through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.

A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you
go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting an apple,--you take up one, and, on
biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard
and green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, green, and
sour. The shopman offers you a third; but, before biting it, you examine
it, and find that it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you
will not have it, as it must be sour, like those that you have already
tried.

Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; but if you will take
the trouble to analyse and trace out into its logical elements what has
been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place
you have performed the operation of induction. You found that, in
two experiences, hardness and greenness in apples went together with
sourness. It was so in the first case, and it was confirmed by the
second. True, it is a very small basis, but still it is enough to make
an induction from; you generalise the facts, and you expect to find
sourness in apples where you get hardness and greenness. You found upon
that a general law that all hard and green apples are sour; and that,
so far as it goes, is a perfect induction. Well, having got your natural
law in this way, when you are offered another apple which you find is
hard and green, you say, "All hard and green apples are sour; this
apple is hard and green, therefore this apple is sour." That train of
reasoning is what logicians call a syllogism, and has all its various
parts and terms,--its major premiss, its minor premiss and its
conclusion. And, by the help of further reasoning, which, if drawn out,
would have to be exhibited in two or three other syllogisms, you arrive
at your final determination, "I will not have that apple." So that, you
see, you have, in the first place, established a law by induction, and
upon that you have founded a deduction, and reasoned out the special
particular case. Well now, suppose, having got your conclusion of the
law, that at some time afterwards, you are discussing the qualities
of apples with a friend: you will say to him, "It is a very curious
thing,--but I find that all hard and green apples are sour!" Your friend
says to you, "But how do you know that?" You at once reply, "Oh, because
I have tried them over and over again, and have always found them to be
so." Well, if we were talking science instead of common sense, we should
call that an experimental verification. And, if still opposed, you go
further, and say, "I have heard from the people in Somersetshire and
Devonshire, where a large number of apples are grown, that they have
observed the same thing. It is also found to be the case in Normandy,
and in North America. In short, I find it to be the universal experience
of mankind wherever attention has been directed to the subject."
Whereupon, your friend, unless he is a very unreasonable man, agrees
with you, and is convinced that you are quite right in the conclusion
you have drawn. He believes, although perhaps he does not know he
believes it, that the more extensive verifications are,--that the more
frequently experiments have been made, and results of the same kind
arrived at,--that the more varied the conditions under which the same
results are attained, the more certain is the ultimate conclusion, and
he disputes the question no further. He sees that the experiment has
been tried under all sorts of conditions, as to time, place, and people,
with the same result; and he says with you, therefore, that the law you
have laid down must be a good one, and he must believe it.

In science we do the same thing;--the philosopher exercises precisely
the same faculties, though in a much more delicate manner. In scientific
inquiry it becomes a matter of duty to expose a supposed law to every
possible kind of verification, and to take care, moreover, that this is
done intentionally, and not left to a mere accident, as in the case of
the apples. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law
is in exact proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our
experimental verifications. For instance, if you let go your grasp of
an article you may have in your hand, it will immediately fall to
the ground. That is a very common verification of one of the best
established laws of nature--that of gravitation. The method by which men
of science establish the existence of that law is exactly the same as
that by which we have established the trivial proposition about
the sourness of hard and green apples. But we believe it in such an
extensive, thorough, and unhesitating manner because the universal
experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it ourselves at any
time; and that is the strongest possible foundation on which any natural
law can rest.

So much, then, by way of proof that the method of establishing laws in
science is exactly the same as that pursued in common life. Let us now
turn to another matter (though really it is but another phase of the
same question), and that is, the method by which, from the relations of
certain phenomena, we prove that some stand in the position of causes
towards the others.

I want to put the case clearly before you, and I will therefore show you
what I mean by another familiar example. I will suppose that one of you,
on coming down in the morning to the parlor of your house, finds that a
tea-pot and some spoons which had been left in the room on the previous
evening are gone,--the window is open, and you observe the mark of a
dirty hand on the window-frame, and perhaps, in addition to that, you
notice the impress of a hob-nailed shoe on the gravel outside. All these
phenomena have struck your attention instantly, and before two seconds
have passed you say, "Oh, somebody has broken open the window, entered
the room, and run off with the spoons and the tea-pot!" That speech is
out of your mouth in a moment. And you will probably add, "I know there
has; I am quite sure of it!" You mean to say exactly what you know;
but in reality you are giving expression to what is, in all essential
particulars, an hypothesis. You do not KNOW it at all; it is nothing but
an hypothesis rapidly framed in your own mind. And it is an hypothesis
founded on a long train of inductions and deductions.

What are those inductions and deductions, and how have you got at this
hypothesis? You have observed in the first place, that the window
is open; but by a train of reasoning involving many inductions and
deductions, you have probably arrived long before at the general
law--and a very good one it is--that windows do not open of themselves;
and you therefore conclude that something has opened the window. A
second general law that you have arrived at in the same way is, that
tea-pots and spoons do not go out of a window spontaneously, and you are
satisfied that, as they are not now where you left them, they have been
removed. In the third place, you look at the marks on the windowsill,
and the shoe-marks outside, and you say that in all previous experience
the former kind of mark has never been produced by anything else but
the hand of a human being; and the same experience shows that no other
animal but man at present wears shoes with hob-nails in them such as
would produce the marks in the gravel. I do not know, even if we could
discover any of those "missing links" that are talked about, that they
would help us to any other conclusion! At any rate the law which states
our present experience is strong enough for my present purpose. You next
reach the conclusion that, as these kind [89] of marks have not been
left by any other animal than man, or are liable to be formed in any
other way than a man's hand and shoe, the marks in question have been
formed by a man in that way. You have, further, a general law, founded
on observation and experience, and that, too, is, I am sorry to say, a
very universal and unimpeachable one,--that some men are thieves;
and you assume at once from all these premisses--and that is what
constitutes your hypothesis--that the man who made the marks outside and
on the window-sill, opened the window, got into the room, and stole
your tea-pot and spoons. You have now arrived at a vera causa;--you
have assumed a cause which, it is plain, is competent to produce all the
phenomena you have observed. You can explain all these phenomena only by
the hypothesis of a thief. But that is a hypothetical conclusion, of the
justice of which you have no absolute proof at all; it is only rendered
highly probable by a series of inductive and deductive reasonings.

I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a man of ordinary
common sense, and that you have established this hypothesis to your own
satisfaction, will very likely be to go off for the police, and set
them on the track of the burglar, with the view to the recovery of your
property. But just as you are starting with this object, some person
comes in, and on learning what you are about, says, "My good friend,
you are going on a great deal too fast. How do you know that the man who
really made the marks took the spoons? It might have been a monkey that
took them, and the man may have merely looked in afterwards." You would
probably reply, "Well, that is all very well, but you see it is contrary
to all experience of the way tea-pots and spoons are abstracted; so
that, at any rate, your hypothesis is less probable than mine." While
you are talking the thing over in this way, another friend arrives, one
of the good kind of people that I was talking of a little while ago. And
he might say, "Oh, my dear sir, you are certainly going on a great
deal too fast. You are most presumptuous. You admit that all these
occurrences took place when you were fast asleep, at a time when you
could not possibly have known anything about what was taking place. How
do you know that the laws of Nature are not suspended during the night?
It may be that there has been some kind of supernatural interference in
this case." In point of fact, he declares that your hypothesis is one
of which you cannot at all demonstrate the truth, and that you are by no
means sure that the laws of Nature are the same when you are asleep as
when you are awake.

Well, now, you cannot at the moment answer that kind of reasoning. You
feel that your worthy friend has you somewhat at a disadvantage. You
will feel perfectly convinced in your own mind, however, that you are
quite right, and you say to him, "My good friend, I can only be guided
by the natural probabilities of the case, and if you will be kind enough
to stand aside and permit me to pass, I will go and fetch the police."
Well, we will suppose that your journey is successful, and that by good
luck you meet with a policeman; that eventually the burglar is found
with your property on his person, and the marks correspond to his hand
and to his boots. Probably any jury would consider those facts a very
good experimental verification of your hypothesis, touching the cause
of the abnormal phenomena observed in your parlor, and would act
accordingly.

Now, in this supposititious case, I have taken phenomena of a very
common kind, in order that you might see what are the different steps in
an ordinary process of reasoning, if you will only take the trouble to
analyse it carefully. All the operations I have described, you will
see, are involved in the mind of any man of sense in leading him to
a conclusion as to the course he should take in order to make good a
robbery and punish the offender. I say that you are led, in that case,
to your conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as that which
a man of science pursues when he is endeavouring to discover the origin
and laws of the most occult phenomena. The process is, and always must
be, the same; and precisely the same mode of reasoning was employed by
Newton [90] and Laplace [91] in their endeavours to discover and define
the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your
own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference
is, that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has
to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack
or flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses
of daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general
correctness of the conclusions at which we may arrive; but, in a
scientific inquiry, a fallacy, great or small, is always of importance,
and is sure to be in the long run constantly productive of mischievous
if not fatal results.

Do not allow yourselves to be misled by the common notion that an
hypothesis is untrustworthy simply because it is an hypothesis. It is
often urged, in respect to some scientific conclusion, that, after
all, it is only an hypothesis. But what more have we to guide us in
nine-tenths of the most important affairs of daily life than hypotheses,
and often very ill-based ones? So that in science, where the evidence of
an hypothesis is subjected to the most rigid examination, we may rightly
pursue the same course. You may have hypotheses, and hypotheses. A man
may say, if he likes, that the moon is made of green cheese: that is an
hypothesis. But another man, who has devoted a great deal of time and
attention to the subject, and availed himself of the most powerful
telescopes and the results of the observations of others, declares that
in his opinion it is probably composed of materials very similar to
those of which our own earth is made up: and that is also only an
hypothesis. But I need not tell you that there is an enormous difference
in the value of the two hypotheses. That one which is based on sound
scientific knowledge is sure to have a corresponding value; and that
which is a mere hasty random guess is likely to have but little value.
Every great step in our progress in discovering causes has been made
in exactly the same way as that which I have detailed to you. A person
observing the occurrence of certain facts and phenomena asks, naturally
enough, what process, what kind of operation known to occur in Nature
applied to the particular case, will unravel and explain the mystery?
Hence you have the scientific hypothesis; and its value will be
proportionate to the care and completeness with which its basis had been
tested and verified. It is in these matters as in the commonest affairs
of practical life: the guess of the fool will be folly, while the guess
of the wise man will contain wisdom. In all cases, you see that the
value of the result depends on the patience and faithfulness with
which the investigator applies to his hypothesis every possible kind of
verification.




ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE [92]


In order to make the title of this discourse generally intelligible, I
have translated the term "Protoplasm," which is the scientific name of
the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical
basis of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a
thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel--so widely
spread is the conception of life as a something which works through
matter, but is independent of it; and even those who are aware that
matter and life are inseparably connected, may not be prepared for
the conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase, "THE physical basis or
matter of life," that there is some one kind of matter which is common
to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound
together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first
apprehended, such a doctrine as this appears almost shocking to common
sense.

What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another,
in faculty, in form, and in substance, than the various kinds of
living beings? What community of faculty can there be between the
bright-coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral
incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to
whom it is instinct with beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds with
knowledge?

Again, think of the microscopic fungus--a mere infinitesimal ovoid
particle, which finds space and duration enough to multiply into
countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wealth
of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between this
bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the
dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres
with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and
go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the
world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale,[93] hugest
of beasts that live, or have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet
of bone, muscle and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in which the
stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would flounder hopelessly; and
contrast him with the invisible animalcules--mere gelatinous specks,
multitudes of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a needle
with the same ease as the angels of the Schoolmen could, in imagination.
With these images before your minds, you may well ask, what community
of form, or structure, is there between the animalcule and the whale;
or between the fungus and the fig-tree? And, a fortiori,[94] between all
four?

Finally, if we regard substance, or material composition, what hidden
bond can connect the flower which a girl wears in her hair and the blood
which courses through her youthful veins; or, what is there in common
between the dense and resisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric
of the tortoise, and those broad disks of glassy jelly which may be seen
pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere
films in the hand which raises them out of their element?

Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every
one who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of a single
physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital
existence; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding
these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity--namely, a unity of
power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial
composition--does pervade the whole living world.


No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place to prove
that the powers, or faculties, of all kinds of living matter, diverse as
they may be in degree, are substantially similar in kind.

Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into the
well-known epigram:--[95]

"Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit? Es will sich ernahren Kinder
zeugen, und die nahren so gut es vermag. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will."


In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious and
complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories.
Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and
development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the
relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the
continuance of the species. Even those manifestations of intellect, of
feeling, and of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are
not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as to every one but
the subject of them, they are known only as transitory changes in the
relative positions of parts of the body. Speech, gesture, and every
other form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable into
muscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a transitory
change in the relative positions of the parts of a muscle. But the
scheme which is large enough to embrace the activities of the highest
form of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant,
or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all
animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under
irritability and contractility; and, it is more than probable, that when
the vegetable world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in
possession of the same powers, at one time or other of their existence.

I am not now alluding to such phaenomena, at once rare and conspicuous,
as those exhibited by the leaflets of the sensitive plants, or the
stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and at the same
time, more subtle and hidden, manifestations of vegetable contractility.
You are doubtless aware that the common nettle owes its stinging
property to the innumerable stiff and needle-like, though exquisitely
delicate, hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle tapers
from a broad base to a slender summit, which, though rounded at the end,
is of such microscopic fineness that it readily penetrates, and breaks
off in, the skin. The whole hair consists of a very delicate outer case
of wood, closely applied to the inner surface of which is a layer of
semi-fluid matter, full of innumerable granules of extreme minuteness.
This semi-fluid lining is protoplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of
bag, full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in form with
the interior of the hair which it fills. When viewed with a sufficiently
high magnifying power, the protoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen
to be in a condition of unceasing activity. Local contractions of the
whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and gradually from point to
point, and give rise to the appearance of progressive waves, just as the
bending of successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces the apparent
billows of a cornfield.

But, in addition to these movements, and independently of them, the
granules are driven, in relatively rapid streams, through channels in
the protoplasm which seem to have a considerable amount of persistence.
Most commonly, the currents in adjacent parts of the protoplasm take
similar directions; and, thus, there is a general stream up one side of
the hair and down the other. But this does not prevent the existence of
partial currents which take different routes; and sometimes trains of
granules may be seen coursing swiftly in opposite directions within
a twenty-thousandth of an inch of one another; while, occasionally,
opposite streams come into direct collision, and, after a longer or
shorter struggle, one predominates. The cause of these currents seems to
lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which
they flow, but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only
their effects, and not themselves.

The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the
compass of the microscopic hair of a plant, which we commonly regard
as a merely passive organism, is not easily forgotten by one who has
watched its display, continued hour after hour, without pause or sign
of weakening. The possible complexity of many other organic forms,
seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one;
and the comparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal
circulation, which has been put forward by an eminent physiologist,
loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of
the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of
very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that
they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable
cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical
forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and could
our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, [96] as they whirl
in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree,
we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.

Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than the exception, that
contractility should be still more openly manifested at some periods of
their existence. The protoplasm of Algae and Fungi becomes, under many
circumstances, partially, or completely, freed from its woody case,
and exhibits movements of its whole mass, or is propelled by the
contractility of one, or more, hair-like prolongations of its body,
which are called vibratile cilia. And, so far as the conditions of the
manifestation of the phaenomena of contractility have yet been studied,
they are the same for the plant as for the animal. Heat and electric
shocks influence both, and in the same way, though it may be in
different degrees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that there
is no difference in faculty between the lowest plant and the highest, or
between plants and animals. But the difference between the powers of the
lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree,
not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards [97] long ago so well pointed
out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labour is
carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts
are competent to perform all functions, and one and the same portion of
protoplasm may successfully take on the function of feeding, moving, or
reproducing apparatus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number
of parts combine to perform each function, each part doing its allotted
share of the work with great accuracy and efficiency, but being useless
for any other purpose.

On the other hand, notwithstanding all the fundamental resemblances
which exist between the powers of the protoplasm in plants and in
animals, they present a striking difference (to which I shall advert
more at length presently), in the fact that plants can manufacture fresh
protoplasm out of mineral compounds, whereas animals are obliged to
procure it ready made, and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants.
Upon what condition this difference in the powers of the two great
divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is at present known.

With such qualifications as arises [98] out of the last-mentioned
fact, it may be truly said that the acts of all living things are
fundamentally one. Is any such unity predicable of their forms? Let us
seek in easily verified facts for a reply to this question. If a drop
of blood be drawn by pricking one's finger, and viewed with proper
precautions, and under a sufficiently high microscopic power, there will
be seen, among the innumerable multitude of little, circular, discoidal
bodies, or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, a
comparatively small number of colourless corpuscles, of somewhat larger
size and very irregular shape. If the drop of blood be kept at the
temperature of the body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to
exhibit a marvellous activity, changing their forms with great rapidity,
drawing in and thrusting out prolongations of their substance, and
creeping about as if they were independent organisms.

The substance which is thus active is a mass of protoplasm, and its
activity differs in detail, rather than in principle, from that of the
protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies
and becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen
a smaller spherical body, which existed, but was more or less hidden,
in the living corpuscle, and is called its nucleus. Corpuscles of
essentially similar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining
of the mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of the body.
Nay, more; in the earliest condition of the human organism, in that
state in which it has but just become distinguishable from the egg in
which it arises, it is nothing but an aggregation of such corpuscles,
and every organ of the body was, once, no more than such an aggregation.

Thus a nucleated mass of protoplasm turns out to be what may be termed
the structural unit of the human body. As a matter of fact, the body, in
its earliest state, is a mere multiple of such units; and in its perfect
condition, it is a multiple of such units, variously modified.

But does the formula which expresses the essential structural character
of the highest animal cover all the rest, as the statement of its powers
and faculties covered that of all others? Very nearly. Beast and
fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed of
structural units of the same character, namely, masses of protoplasm
with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which,
structurally, is a mere colourless blood-corpuscle, leading an
independent life. But, at the very bottom of the animal scale, even
this simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phaenomena of life are
manifested by a particle of protoplasm without a nucleus. Nor are such
organisms insignificant by reason of their want of complexity. It is a
fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest forms of life,
which people an immense extent of the bottom of the sea, would not
outweigh that of all the higher living beings which inhabit the land put
together. And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, such
living beings as these have been the greatest of rock builders.

What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants.
Imbedded in the protoplasm at the broad, or attached, end of the nettle
hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further
proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition
of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case,
which is modified in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes into
a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule.
Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in
a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in
the lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute the
whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist without a nucleus.

Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of
non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from another? why call one
"plant" and the other "animal"?

The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals
are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of
convention whether we call a given organism an animal or a plant. There
is a living body called Aethalium septicum, which appears upon decaying
vegetable substances, and, in one of its forms, is common upon the
surfaces of tan-pits. In this condition it is, to all intents and
purposes, a fungus, and formerly was always regarded as such; but the
remarkable investigations of De Bary [99] have shown that, in another
condition, the Aethalium is an actively locomotive creature, and takes
in solid matters, upon which, apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the
most characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant; or is it an
animal? Is it both; or is it neither? Some decide in favour of the last
supposition, and establish an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological
No Man's Land [100] for all these questionable forms. But, as it is
admittedly impossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this
no man's land and the vegetable world on the one hand, or the animal,
on the other, it appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the
difficulty which, before, was single.

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is
the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains
clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick
or sun-dried clod.

Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and that all
living forms are fundamentally of one character. The researches of
the chemist have revealed a no less striking uniformity of material
composition in living matter.

In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell
us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter,
inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of analysis,--and upon
this very obvious ground, objections, which I confess seem to me to be
somewhat frivolous, have been raised to the drawing of any conclusions
whatever respecting the composition of actually living matter, from
that of the dead matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But
objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that it is also, in
strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body
whatever, as it is. The statement that a crystal of calc-spar
consists of carbonate of lime, is quite true, if we only mean that,
by appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and
quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the very quicklime
thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again; but it will
not be calc-spar, nor anything like it. Can it, therefore, be said that
chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of
calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so
than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying
the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have yielded
them.

One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements, and this is,
that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain
the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very
complex union, and that they behave similarly towards several reagents.
To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been
determined with exactness, the name of Protein has been applied. And
if we use this term with such caution as may properly arise out of our
comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may be
truly said, that all protoplasm is proteinaceous, or, as the white, or
albumen, of an egg is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure
proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is more or less
albuminoid.

Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are
affected by the direct action of electric shocks; and yet the number of
cases in which the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be affected by
this agency increases every day.

Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence, that all forms of
protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a
temperature of 40-50 degrees centigrade, which has been called
"heat-stiffening," though Kuhne's [101] beautiful researches have proved
this occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse living beings,
that it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all.


Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the existence of a general
uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis, of
life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will
be understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any
amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The
mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters,
though no one doubts that, under all these Protean changes, it is one
and the same thing.

And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter
of life?

Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout
the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable
in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable
permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the
matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in
the manner in which its atoms are aggregated? Is it built up of ordinary
matter, and again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done?

Modern science does not hesitate a moment between these alternatives.
Physiology writes over the portals of life--

"Debemur morti nos nostraque,"[102]

with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that
melancholy line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus
or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and
is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always
dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it
died.

In the wonderful story of the Peau de Chagrin,[103] the hero becomes
possessed of a magical wild ass' skin, which yields him the means of
gratifying all his wishes. But its surface represents the duration of
the proprietor's life; and for every satisfied desire the skin shrinks
in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length life and
the last handbreadth of the peau de chagrin, disappear with the
gratification of a last wish.

Balzac's [104] studies had led him over a wide range of thought and
speculation, and his shadowing forth of physiological truth in this
strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life
is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat
the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results,
directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm.

Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some physical loss; and,
in the strictest sense, he burns that others may have light--so much
eloquence, so much of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and
urea. It is clear that this process of expenditure cannot go on for
ever. But, happily, the protoplasmic peau de chagrin differs from
Balzac's in its capacity of being repaired, and brought back to its full
size, after every exertion.

For example, this present lecture, whatever its intellectual worth
to you, has a certain physical value to me, which is, conceivably,
expressible by the number of grains of protoplasm and other bodily
substance wasted in maintaining my vital processes during its delivery.
My peau de chagrin will be distinctly smaller at the end of the
discourse than it was at the beginning. By and by, I shall probably have
recourse to the substance commonly called mutton, for the purpose of
stretching it back to its original size. Now this mutton was once the
living protoplasm, more or less modified, of another animal--a sheep. As
I shall eat it, it is the same matter altered, not only by death, but by
exposure to sundry artificial operations in the process of cooking.

But these changes, whatever be their extent, have not rendered it
incompetent to resume its old functions as matter of life. A singular
inward laboratory, which I possess, will dissolve a certain portion of
the modified protoplasm; the solution so formed will pass into my
veins; and the subtle influences to which it will then be subjected will
convert the dead protoplasm into living protoplasm, and transubstantiate
sheep into man.

Nor is this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled with, I might
sup upon lobster, and the matter of life of the crustacean would undergo
the same wonderful metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return to
my own place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the crustacean might, and
probably would, return the compliment, and demonstrate our common nature
by turning my protoplasm into living lobster. Or, if nothing better were
to be had, I might supply my wants with mere bread, and I should find
the protoplasm of the wheat-plant to be convertible into man, with no
more trouble than that of the sheep, and with far less, I fancy, than
that of the lobster.

Hence it appears to be a matter of no great moment what animal, or what
plant, I lay under contribution for protoplasm, and the fact speaks
volumes for the general identity of that substance in all living beings.
I share this catholicity of assimilation with other animals, all of
which, so far as we know, could thrive equally well on the protoplasm of
any of their fellows, or of any plant; but here the assimilative powers
of the animal world cease. A solution of smelling-salts in water, with
an infinitesimal proportion of some other saline matters, contains all
the elementary bodies which enter into the composition of protoplasm;
but, as I need hardly say, a hogshead of that fluid would not keep a
hungry man from starving, nor would it save any animal whatever from a
like fate. An animal cannot make protoplasm, but must take it ready-made
from some other animal, or some plant--the animal's highest feat of
constructive chemistry being to convert dead protoplasm into that living
matter of life which is appropriate to itself.

Therefore, in seeking for the origin of protoplasm, we must eventually
turn to the vegetable world. A fluid containing carbonic acid, water,
and nitrogenous salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast [105] to the
animal, is a table richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, with a
due supply of only such materials, many a plant will not only maintain
itself in vigour, but grow and multiply until it has increased a
million-fold, or a million million-fold, the quantity of protoplasm
which it originally possessed; in this way building up the matter of
life, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter of the universe.

Thus, the animal can only raise the complex substance of dead protoplasm
to the higher power, as one may say, of living protoplasm; while the
plant can raise the less complex substances--carbonic acid, water, and
nitrogenous salts--to the same stage of living protoplasm, if not to the
same level. But the plant also has its limitations. Some of the fungi,
for example, appear to need higher compounds to start with; and no known
plant can live upon the uncompounded elements of protoplasm. A plant
supplied with pure carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus,
sulphur, and the like, would as infallibly die as the animal in his bath
of smelling-salts, though it would be surrounded by all the constituents
of protoplasm. Nor, indeed, need the process of simplification of
vegetable food be carried so far as this, in order to arrive at the
limit of the plant's thaumaturgy. Let water, carbonic acid, and all the
other needful constituents be supplied except nitrogenous salts, and an
ordinary plant will still be unable to manufacture protoplasm.

Thus the matter of life, so far as we know it (and we have no right to
speculate on any other), breaks up, in consequence of that continual
death which is the condition of its manifesting vitality, into carbonic
acid, water, and nitrogenous compounds, which certainly possess no
properties but those of ordinary matter. And out of these same forms of
ordinary matter, and from none which are simpler, the vegetable world
builds up all the protoplasm which keeps the animal world a-going.
Plants are the accumulators of the power which animals distribute and
disperse.

But it will be observed, that the existence of the matter of life
depends on the pre-existence of certain compounds; namely, carbonic
acid, water, and certain nitrogenous bodies. Withdraw any one of these
three from the world, and all vital phaenomena come to an end. They are
as necessary to the protoplasm of the plant, as the protoplasm of the
plant is to that of the animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen
are all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain
proportions and under certain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid;
hydrogen and oxygen produce water; nitrogen and other elements give rise
to nitrogenous salts. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies
of which they are composed, are lifeless. But when they are brought
together, under certain conditions, they give rise to the still more
complex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits the phaenomena of
life.

I see no break in this series of steps in molecular complication, and I
am unable to understand why the language which is applicable to any one
term of the series may not be used to any of the others. We think fit to
call different kinds of matter carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen,
and to speak of the various powers and activities of these substances as
the properties of the matter of which they are composed.

When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in a certain proportion, and an
electric spark is passed through them, they disappear, and a quantity
of water, equal in weight to the sum of their weights, appears in their
place. There is not the slightest parity between the passive and active
powers of the water and those of the oxygen and hydrogen which
have given rise to it. At 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and far below that
temperature, oxygen and hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose
particles tend to rush away from one another with great force. Water, at
the same temperature, is a strong though brittle solid whose particles
tend to cohere into definite geometrical shapes, and sometimes build up
frosty imitations of the most complex forms of vegetable foliage.

Nevertheless we call these, and many other strange phaenomena, the
properties of the water, and we do not hesitate to believe that, in
some way or another, they result from the properties of the component
elements of the water. We do not assume that a something called
"aquosity" entered into and took possession of the oxidated hydrogen as
soon as it was formed, and then guided the aqueous particles to their
places in the facets of the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the
hoar-frost. On the contrary, we live in the hope and in the faith that,
by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by and by be able to see
our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of
water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the
form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.

Is the case in any way changed when carbonic acid, water, and
nitrogenous salts disappear, and in their place, under the influence of
pre-existing living protoplasm, an equivalent weight of the matter of
life makes its appearance?

It is true that there is no sort of parity between the properties of the
components and the properties of the resultant, but neither was there in
the case of the water. It is also true that what I have spoken of as
the influence of pre-existing living matter is something quite
unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehend the modus operandi
[106] of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of oxygen and
hydrogen?

What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the existence
in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or
correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it? What better
philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should
"vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have
disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus [107] accounted for the operation
of the meat-jack [108] by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and
scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit
by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney.

If scientific language is to possess a definite and constant
signification whenever it is employed, it seems to me that we are
logically bound to apply to the protoplasm, or physical basis of life,
the same conceptions as those which are held to be legitimate elsewhere.
If the phaenomena exhibited by water are its properties, so are those
presented by protoplasm, living or dead, its properties.

If the properties of water may be properly said to result from the
nature and disposition of its component molecules, I can find no
intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of
protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules.

But I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are
placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's
estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of
heaven. It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions
of a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties of their protoplasm,
and are the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they
are composed. But if, as I have endeavoured to prove to you, their
protoplasm is essentially identical with, and most readily converted
into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-place
between the admission that such is the case, and the further concession
that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the
result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. And
if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the same extent, that
the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts
regarding them, are the expression of molecular changes in that matter
of life which is the source of our other vital phaenomena.[109]




ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS [110]


The marine productions which are commonly known by the names of "Corals"
and "Corallines," were thought by the ancients to be sea-weeds, which
had the singular property of becoming hard and solid, when they were
fished up from their native depths and came into contact with the air.


"Sic et curalium, quo primum contigit auras Tempore durescit: mollis
fuit herba sub undis,"[111]


says Ovid (Metam. xv); and it was not until the seventeenth century that
Boccone [112] was emboldened, by personal experience of the facts, to
declare that the holders of this belief were no better than "idiots,"
who had been misled by the softness of the outer coat of the living red
coral to imagine that it was soft all through.

Messer Boccone's strong epithet is probably undeserved, as the notion he
controverts, in all likelihood, arose merely from the misinterpretation
of the strictly true statement which any coral fisherman would make to
a curious inquirer; namely, that the outside coat of the red coral is
quite soft when it is taken out of the sea. At any rate, he did good
service by eliminating this much error from the current notions about
coral. But the belief that corals are plants remained, not only in the
popular, but in the scientific mind; and it received what appeared to be
a striking confirmation from the researches of Marsigli [113] in 1706.
For this naturalist, having the opportunity of observing freshly-taken
red coral, saw that its branches were beset with what looked like
delicate and beautiful flowers each having eight petals. It was true
that these "flowers" could protrude and retract themselves, but their
motions were hardly more extensive, or more varied, than those of the
leaves of the sensitive plant; and therefore they could not be held to
militate against the conclusion so strongly suggested by their form and
their grouping upon the branches of a tree-like structure.

Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young Marseilles physician,
Peyssonel, conceived the desire to study these singular sea-plants, and
was sent by the French Government on a mission to the Mediterranean for
that purpose. The pupil undertook the investigation full of confidence
in the ideas of his master, but being able to see and think for himself,
he soon discovered that those ideas by no means altogether corresponded
with reality. In an essay entitled "Traite du Corail," which was
communicated to the French Academy of Science, but which has never been
published, Peyssonel writes:--

"Je fis fleurir le corail dans des vases pleins d'eau de mer, et
j'observai que ce que nous croyons etre la fleur de cette pretendue
plante n'etait au vrai, qu'un insecte semblable a une petite Ortie ou
Poulpe. J'avais le plaisir de voir remuer les pattes, ou pieds, de cette
Ortie, et ayant mis le vase plein d'eau ou le corail etait a une douce
chaleur aupres du feu, tous les petits insectes s'epanouirent.--L'Ortie
sortie etend les pieds, et forme ce que M. de Marsigli et moi avions
pris pour les petales de la fleur. Le calice de cette pretendue fleur
est le corps meme de l'animal avance et sorti hors de la cellule."*[114]

     * This extract from Peyssonel's manuscript is given by M.
     Lacaze Duthiers in his valuable Histoire Naturelle du Corail
     (1866).

The comparison of the flowers of the coral to a "petite ortie," or
"little nettle," is perfectly just, but needs explanation. "Ortie de
mer," or "sea-nettle," is, in fact, the French appellation for our
"sea-anemone," a creature with which everybody, since the great aquarium
mania, must have become familiar, even to the limits of boredom. In
1710, the great naturalist, Reaumur,[115] had written a memoir for the
express purpose of demonstrating that these "orties" are animals; and
with this important paper Peyssonel must necessarily have been familiar.
Therefore, when he declared the "flowers" of the red coral to be little
"orties," it was the same thing as saying that they were animals of the
same general nature as sea-anemones. But to Peyssonel's contemporaries
this was an extremely startling announcement. It was hard to imagine the
existence of such a thing as an association of animals into a structure
with stem and branches altogether like a plant, and fixed to the soil
as a plant is fixed; and the naturalists of that day preferred not to
imagine it. Even Reaumur could not bring himself to accept the notion,
and France being blessed with Academicians, whose great function (as the
late Bishop Wilson [116] and an eminent modern writer [117] have so well
shown) is to cause sweetness and light to prevail, and to prevent such
unmannerly fellows as Peyssonel from blurting out unedifying truths,
they suppressed him; and, as aforesaid, his great work remained in
manuscript, and may at this day be consulted by the curious in that
state, in the Bibliotheque du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. Peyssonel,
who evidently was a person of savage and untameable disposition, so far
from appreciating the kindness of the Academicians in giving him time to
reflect upon the unreasonableness, not to say rudeness, of making public
statements in opposition to the views of some of the most distinguished
of their body, seems bitterly to have resented the treatment he met
with. For he sent all further communications to the Royal Society of
London, which never had, and it is to be hoped never will have,
anything of an academic constitution; and finally he took himself off to
Guadaloupe, and became lost to science altogether.

Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed paper,
the Abbe Trembley [118] published his wonderful researches upon the
fresh-water Hydra. Bernard de Jussieu [119] and Guettard [120] followed
them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines;
Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel's
views, adopted them, and made him a half-and-half apology in the preface
to the next published volume of the "Memoires pour servir l'Histoire des
Insectes;" and, from this time forth, Peyssonel's doctrine that
corals are the work of animal organisms has been part of the body of
established scientific truth.

Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already cited, compares the
flower-like animal of the coral to a "poulpe," which is the French
form of the name "polypus,"--"the many-footed,"--which the ancient
naturalists gave to the soft-bodied cuttlefishes, which, like the coral
animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, disposed around a central mouth.
Reaumur, admitting the analogy indicated by Peyssonel, gave the name
of polypes, not only to the sea-anemone, the coral animal, and the
fresh-water Hydra, but to what are now known as the Polyzoa, and he
termed the skeleton which they fabricate a "polypier," or "polypidom."

The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time, has made us very
completely acquainted with the structure and habits of all these
polypes. We know that, among the sea-anemones and coral-forming animals,
each poylpe has a mouth leading to a stomach, which is open at its inner
end, and thus communicates freely with the general cavity of the body;
that the tentacles placed round the mouth are hollow, and that they
perform the part of arms in seizing and capturing prey. It is known that
many of these creatures are capable of being multiplied by artificial
division, the divided halves growing, after a time, into complete and
separate animals; and that many are able to perform a very similar
process naturally, in such a manner that one polype may, by repeated
incomplete divisions, give rise to a sort of sheet, or turf, formed by
innumerable connected, and yet independent, descendants. Or, what is
still more common, a polype may throw out buds, which are converted into
polypes, or branches bearing polypes, until a tree-like mass, sometimes
of very considerable size, is formed.

This is what happens in the case of the red coral of commerce. A minute
polype, fixed to the rocky bottom of the deep sea, grows up into a
branched trunk. The end of every branch and twig is terminated by
a polype; and all the polypes are connected together by a fleshy
substance, traversed by innumerable canals which place each polype in
communication with every other, and carry nourishment to the substance
of the supporting stem. It is a sort of natural cooperative store,
every polype helping the whole, at the same time as it helps itself. The
interior of the stem, like that of the branches, is solidified by the
deposition of carbonate of lime in its tissue, somewhat in the same
fashion as our own bones are formed of animal matter impregnated with
lime salts; and it is this dense skeleton (usually turned red by a
peculiar colouring matter) cleared of the soft animal investment, as
the hard wood of a tree might be stripped of its bark, which is the red
coral.

In the case of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs to the interior
of the stem and branches only; but in the commoner white corals, each
polype has a complete skeleton of its own. These polypes are sometimes
solitary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by a single
cup, with partitions radiating from its centre to its circumference.
When the polypes formed by budding or division remain associated, the
polypidom is sometimes made up of nothing but an aggregation of these
cups, while at other times the cups are at once separated and held
together, by an intermediate substance, which represents the branches
of the red coral. The red coral polype again is a comparatively rare
animal, inhabiting a limited area, the skeleton of which has but a very
insignificant mass; while the white corals are very common, occur
in almost all seas, and form skeletons which are sometimes extremely
massive.

With a very few exceptions, both the red and the white coral polypes
are, in their adult state, firmly adherent to the sea-bottom; nor do
their buds naturally become detached and locomotive. But, in addition to
budding and division, these creatures possess the more ordinary methods
of multiplication; and, at particular seasons, they give rise to
numerous eggs of minute size. Within these eggs the young are formed,
and they leave the egg in a condition which has no sort of resemblance
to the perfect animal. It is, in fact, a minute oval body, many hundred
times smaller than the full grown creature, and it swims about with
great activity by the help of multitudes of little hair-like filaments,
called cilia, with which its body is covered. These cilia all lash the
water in one direction, and so drive the little body along as if it were
propelled by thousands of extremely minute paddles. After enjoying its
freedom for a longer or shorter time, and being carried either by the
force of its own cilia, or by currents which bear it along, the embryo
coral settles down to the bottom, loses its cilia, and becomes fixed to
the rock, gradually assuming the polype form and growing up to the size
of its parent. As the infant polypes of the coral may retain this free
and active condition for many hours, or even days, and as a tidal or
other current in the sea may easily flow at the speed of two or even
more miles in an hour, it is clear that the embryo must often be
transported to very considerable distances from the parent. And it is
easily understood how a single polype, which may give rise to hundreds,
or perhaps thousands, of embryos, may, by this process of partly
active and partly passive migration, cover an immense surface with its
offspring.

The masses of coral which may be formed by the assemblages of polypes
which spring by budding, or by dividing, from a single polype,
occasionally attain very considerable dimensions. Such skeletons are
sometimes great plates, many feet long and several feet in thickness; or
they may form huge half globes, like the brainstone corals, or may reach
the magnitude of stout shrubs or even small trees. There is reason to
believe that such masses as these take a long time to form, and
hence that the age a polype tree, or polype turf, may attain, may be
considerable. But, sooner or later, the coral polypes, like all other
things, die; the soft flesh decays, while the skeleton is left as a
stony mass at the bottom of the sea, where it retains its integrity for
a longer or a shorter time, according as its position affords more or
less protection from the wear and tear of the waves.

The polypes which give rise to the white coral are found, as has been
said, in the seas of all parts of the world; but in the temperate and
cold oceans they are scattered and comparatively small in size, so that
the skeletons of those which die do not accumulate in any considerable
quantity. But it is otherwise in the greater part of the ocean which
lies in the warmer parts of the world, comprised within a distance of
about eighteen hundred miles on each side of the equator. Within the
zone thus bounded, by far the greater part of the ocean is inhabited by
coral polypes, which not only form very strong and large skeletons, but
associate together into great masses, like the thickets and the meadow
turf, or, better still, the accumulations of peat, to which plants give
rise on dry land. These masses of stony matter, heaped up beneath the
waters of the ocean, become as dangerous to mariners as so much ordinary
rock, and to these, as to the common rock ridges, the seaman gives the
name of "reefs."

Such coral reefs cover many thousand square miles in the Pacific and in
the Indian Oceans. There is one reef, or rather great series of reefs,
called the Barrier Reef, which stretches, almost continuously, for more
than eleven hundred miles off the east coast of Australia. Multitudes
of the islands in the Pacific are either reefs themselves, or are
surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea is in many parts almost a maze of such
reefs, and they abound no less in the West Indies, along the coast of
Florida, and even as far north as the Bahama Islands. But it is a very
remarkable circumstance that, within the area of what we may call the
"coral zone," there are no coral reefs upon the west coast of America,
nor upon the west coast of Africa; and it is a general fact that the
reefs are interrupted, or absent, opposite the mouths of great rivers.
The causes of this apparent caprice in the distribution of coral reefs
are not far to seek. The polypes which fabricate them require for their
vigorous growth a temperature which must not fall below 68 degrees
Fahrenheit all the year round, and this temperature is only to be
found within the distance on each side of the equator which has been
mentioned, or thereabouts. But even within the coral zone this degree of
warmth is not everywhere to be had. On the west coast of America, and on
the corresponding coast of Africa, the currents of cold water from the
icy regions which surround the South Pole set northward, and it appears
to be due to their cooling influence that the sea in these regions is
free from the reef builders. Again, the coral polypes cannot live in
water which is rendered brackish by floods from the land, or which is
perturbed by mud from the same source, and hence it is that they cease
to exist opposite the mouths of rivers, which damage them in both these
ways.

Such is the general distribution of the reef-building corals, but there
are some very interesting and singular circumstances to be observed in
the conformation of the reefs, when we consider them individually. The
reefs, in fact, are of three different kinds; some of them stretch out
from the shore, almost like a prolongation of the beach, covered only
by shallow water, and in the case of an island, surrounding it like a
fringe of no considerable breadth. These are termed "fringing reefs."
Others are separated by a channel which may attain a width of many
miles, and a depth of twenty or thirty fathoms or more, from the nearest
land; and when this land is an island, the reef surrounds it like a low
wall, and the sea between the reef and the land is, as it were, a moat
inside this wall. Such reefs as these are called "encircling" when they
surround an island; and "barrier" reefs, when they stretch parallel with
the coast of a continent. In both these cases there is ordinary dry land
inside the reef, and separated from it only by a narrower or a wider,
a shallower or a deeper, space of sea, which is called a "lagoon,"
or "inner passage." But there is a third kind of reef, of very common
occurrence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which goes by the name
of "atoll." This is, to all intents and purposes, an encircling reef,
without anything to encircle; or, in other words, without an island
in the middle of its lagoon. The atoll has exactly the appearance of a
vast, irregularly oval, or circular, breakwater, enclosing smooth water
in its midst. The depth of the water in the lagoon rarely exceeds twenty
or thirty fathoms, but, outside the reef, it deepens with great rapidity
to two hundred or three hundred fathoms. The depth immediately outside
the barrier, or encircling, reefs, may also be very considerable; but,
at the outer edge of a fringing reef, it does not amount usually to more
than twenty or twenty-five fathoms; in other words, from one hundred and
twenty to one hundred and fifty feet.

Thus, if the water of the ocean should be suddenly drained away, we
should see the atolls rising from the sea-bed like vast truncated cones,
and resembling so many volcanic craters, except that their sides
would be steeper than those of an ordinary volcano. In the case of the
encircling reefs, the cone, with the enclosed island, would look like
Vesuvius with Monte Nuovo within the old crater of Somma;[121] while,
finally, the island with a fringing reef would have the appearance of an
ordinary hill, or mountain, girded by a vast parapet, within which would
lie a shallow moat. And the dry bed of the Pacific might afford grounds
for an inhabitant of the moon to speculate upon the extraordinary
subterranean activity to which these vast and numerous "craters" bore
witness!

When the structure of a fringing reef is investigated, the bottom of the
lagoon is found to be covered with fine whitish mud, which results from
the breaking up of the dead corals. Upon this muddy floor there lie,
here and there, growing corals, or occasionally great blocks of dead
coral, which have been torn by storms from the outer edge of the reef,
and washed into the lagoon. Shellfish and worms of various kinds abound;
and fish, some of which prey upon the coral, sport in the deeper pools.
But the corals which are to be seen growing in the shallow waters of the
lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge
of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward
edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always
breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular
vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime--the so-called
Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edge of the reef which is
always covered by the breaking waves, the living, true, reef-polypes
make their appearance; and, in different forms, coat the steep seaward
face of the reef to a depth of one hundred or even one hundred and fifty
feet. Beyond this depth the sounding-lead rests, not upon the wall-like
face of the reef, but on the ordinary shelving sea-bottom. And the
distance to which a fringing reef extends from the land corresponds with
that at which the sea has a depth of twenty or five-and-twenty fathoms.

If, as we have supposed, the sea could be suddenly withdrawn from around
an island provided with a fringing reef, such as the Mauritius,[122]
the reef would present the aspect of a terrace, its seaward face, one
hundred feet or more high, blooming with the animal flowers of the
coral, while its surface would be hollowed out into a shallow and
irregular moat-like excavation.

The coral mud, which occupies the bottom of the lagoon, and with which
all the interstices of the coral skeletons which accumulate to form
the reef are filled up, does not proceed from the washing action of the
waves alone; innumerable fishes, and other creatures which prey upon the
coral, add a very important contribution of finely-triturated calcareous
matter; and the corals and mud becoming incorporated together, gradually
harden and give rise to a sort of limestone rock, which may vary a good
deal in texture. Sometimes it remains friable and chalky, but, more
often, the infiltration of water, charged with carbonic acid, dissolves
some of the calcareous matter, and deposits it elsewhere in the
interstices of the nascent rock, thus glueing and cementing the
particles together into a hard mass; or it may even dissolve the
carbonate of lime more extensively, and re-deposit it in a crystalline
form. On the beach of the lagoon, where the coral sand is washed into
layers by the action of the waves, its grains become thus fused together
into strata of a limestone, so hard that they ring when struck with a
hammer, and inclined at a gentle angle, corresponding with that of the
surface of the beach. The hard parts of the many animals which live upon
the reef become imbedded in this coral limestone, so that a block may
be full of shells of bivalves and univalves, or of sea urchins; and even
sometimes encloses the eggs of turtles in a state of petrification.
The active and vigorous growth of the reef goes on only at the seaward
margins, where the polypes are exposed to the wash of the surf, and
are thereby provided with an abundant supply of air and of food.
The interior portion of the reef may be regarded as almost wholly an
accumulation of dead skeletons. Where a river comes down from the land
there is a break in the reef, for the reasons which have been already
mentioned.

The origin and mode of formation of a fringing reef, such as that just
described, are plain enough. The embryos of the coral polypes have fixed
themselves upon the submerged shore of the island, as far out as they
could live, namely, to a depth of twenty or twenty-five fathoms. One
generation has succeeded another, building itself up upon the dead
skeletons of its predecessor. The mass has been consolidated by
the infiltration of coral mud, and hardened by partial solution and
redeposition, until a great rampart of coral rock one hundred or one
hundred and fifty feet high on its seaward face has been formed all
round the island, with only such gaps as result from the outflow of
rivers, in the place of sally-ports.

The structure of the rocky accumulation in the encircling reefs and
in the atolls is essentially the same as in the fringing reef. But, in
addition to the differences of depth inside and out, they present some
other peculiarities. These reefs, and especially the atolls, are usually
interrupted at one part of their circumference, and this part is always
situated on the leeward side of the reef, or that which is the more
sheltered side. Now, as all these reefs are situated within the region
in which the tradewinds prevail, it follows that, on the north side of
the equator, where the trade-wind is a northeasterly wind, the opening
of the reef is on the southwest side: while in the southern hemisphere,
where the trade-winds blow from the southeast, the opening lies to the
northwest. The curious practical result follows from this structure,
that the lagoons to these reefs really form admirable harbours, if
a ship can only get inside them. But the main difference between the
encircling reefs and the atolls, on the one hand, and the fringing reefs
on the other, lies in the fact of the much greater depth of water on the
seaward faces of the former. As a consequence of this fact, the whole
of this face is not, as it is in the case of the fringing reef, covered
with living coral polypes. For, as we have seen, these polypes cannot
live at a greater depth than about twenty-five fathoms; and actual
observation has shown that while, down to this depth, the sounding-lead
will bring up branches of live coral from the outer wall of such a reef,
at a greater depth it fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and
coral sand. We must, therefore, picture to ourselves an atoll, or an
encircling reef, as fringed for one hundred feet, or more, from its
summit, with coral polypes busily engaged in fabricating coral; while,
below this comparatively narrow belt, its surface is a bare and smooth
expanse of coral sand, supported upon and within a core of coral
limestone. Thus, if the bed of the Pacific were suddenly laid bare, as
was just now supposed, the appearance of the reef-mountains would be
exactly the reverse of that presented by many high mountains on land.
For these are white with snow at the top, while their bases are clothed
with an abundant and gaudily-coloured vegetation. But the coral cones
would look grey and barren below, while their summits would be gay with
a richly-coloured parterre of flowerlike coral polypes.

The practical difficulties of sounding upon, and of bringing up portions
of, the seaward face of an atoll or of an encircling reef, are so great,
in consequence of the constant and dangerous swell which sets towards
it, that no exact information concerning the depth to which the reefs
are composed of coral has yet been obtained. There is no reason to
doubt, however, that the reef-cone has the same structure from its
summit to its base, and that its sea-wall is throughout mainly composed
of dead coral.

And now arises a serious difficulty. If the coral polypes cannot live at
a greater depth than one hundred or one hundred and fifty feet, how can
they have built up the base of the reef-cone, which may be two thousand
feet, or more, below the surface of the sea?

In order to get over this objection, it was at one time supposed that
the reef-building polypes had settled upon the summits of a chain of
submarine mountains. But what is there in physical geography to justify
the assumption of the existence of a chain of mountains stretching for
one thousand miles or more, and so nearly of the same height, that none
should rise above the level of the sea, nor fall one hundred and fifty
feet below that level?

How, again, on this hypothesis, are atolls to be accounted for, unless,
as some have done, we take refuge in the wild supposition that every
atoll corresponds with the crater of a submarine volcano? And what
explanation does it afford of the fact that, in some parts of the ocean,
only atolls and encircling reefs occur, while others present none but
fringing reefs?

These and other puzzling facts remained insoluble until the publication,
in the year 1840, of Mr. Darwin's famous work on coral reefs;[123] in
which a key was given to all the difficult problems connected with the
subject, and every difficulty was shown to be capable of solution by
deductive reasoning from a happy combination of certain well-established
geological and biological truths. Mr. Darwin, in fact, showed that,
so long as the level of the sea remains unaltered in any area in which
coral reefs are being formed, or if the level of the sea relatively
to that of the land is falling, the only reefs which can be formed
are fringing reefs. While if, on the contrary, the level of the sea is
rising relatively to that of the land, at a rate not faster than that
at which the upward growth of the coral can keep pace with it, the reef
will gradually pass from the condition of a fringing, into that of an
encircling or barrier reef. And, finally, that if the relative level of
the sea rise so much that the encircled land is completely submerged,
the reef must necessarily pass into the condition of an atoll.

For, suppose the relative level of the sea to remain stationary, after a
fringing reef has reached that distance from the land at which the depth
of water amounts to one hundred and fifty feet. Then the reef cannot
extend seaward by the migration of coral germs, because these coral
germs would find the bottom of the sea to be too deep for them to live
in. And the only manner in which the reef could extend outwards, would
be by the gradual accumulation, at the foot of its seaward face, of a
talus of coral fragments torn off by the violence of the waves, which
talus might, in course of time, become high enough to bring its upper
surface within the limits of coral growth, and in that manner provide a
sort of factitious sea-bottom upon which the coral embryos might perch.
If, on the other hand, the level of the sea were slowly and gradually
lowered, it is clear that the parts of its bottom originally beyond the
limit of coral growth would gradually be brought within the required
distance of the surface, and thus the reef might be indefinitely
extended. But this process would give rise neither to an encircling reef
nor to an atoll, but to a broad belt of upheaved coral rock, increasing
the dimensions of the dry land, and continuous seawards with the fresh
fringing reef.

Suppose, however, that the sea-level rose instead of falling, at the
same slow and gradual rate at which we know it to be rising in some
parts of the world,--not more, in fact, than a few inches, or, at most,
a foot or two, in a hundred years. Then, while the reef would be unable
to extend itself seaward, the sea-bottom outside it being gradually more
and more removed from the depth at which the life of the coral polypes
is possible, it would be able to grow upwards as fast as the sea
rose. But the growth would take place almost exclusively around the
circumference of the reef, this being the only region in which the coral
polypes would find the conditions favourable for their existence. The
bottom of the lagoon would be raised, in the main, only by the
coral debris and coral mud, formed in the manner already described;
consequently, the margins of the reef would rise faster than the bottom,
or, in other words, the lagoon would constantly become deeper. And, at
the same time, it would gradually increase in breadth; as the rising
sea, covering more of the land, would occupy a wider space between the
edge of the reef and what remained of the land. Thus the rising sea
would eventually convert a large island with a fringing reef into a
small island surrounded by an encircling reef. And it will be obvious
that when the rising of the sea has gone so far as completely to cover
the highest points of the island, the reef will have passed into the
condition of an atoll.

But how is it possible that the relative level of the land and sea
should be altered to this extent? Clearly, only in one of two ways:
either the sea must have risen over those areas which are now covered by
atolls and encircling reefs; or, the land upon which the sea rests must
have been depressed to a corresponding extent.

If the sea has risen, its rise must have taken place over the whole
world simultaneously, and it must have risen to the same height over all
parts of the coral zone. Grounds have been shown for the belief that the
general level of the sea may have been different at different times; it
has been suggested, for example, that the accumulation of ice about the
poles during one of the cold periods of the earth's history necessarily
implies a diminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to the amount
of its water thus permanently locked up in the Arctic and Antarctic
ice-cellars; while, in the warm periods, the greater or less
disappearance of the polar ice-cap implies a corresponding addition of
water to the ocean. And no doubt this reasoning must be admitted to be
sound in principle; though it is very hard to say what practical effect
the additions and subtractions thus made have had on the level of the
ocean; inasmuch as such additions and subtractions might be either
intensified or nullified, by contemporaneous changes in the level of the
land. And no one has yet shown that any such great melting of polar ice,
and consequent raising of the level of the water of the ocean, has taken
place since the existing atolls began to be formed.

In the absence of any evidence that the sea has ever risen to the extent
required to give rise to the encircling reefs and the atolls, Mr. Darwin
adopted the opposite hypothesis, viz., that the land has undergone
extensive and slow depression in those localities in which these
structures exist.

It seems, at first, a startling paradox, to suppose that the land
is less fixed than the sea; but that such is the case is the uniform
testimony of geology. Beds of sandstone or limestone, thousands of feet
thick, and all full of marine remains, occur in various parts of the
earth's surface, and prove, beyond a doubt, that when these beds
were formed, that portion of the sea-bottom which they then occupied
underwent a slow and gradual depression to a distance which cannot have
been less than the thickness of those beds, and may have been very much
greater. In supposing, therefore, that the great areas of the Pacific
and of the Indian Ocean, over which atolls and encircling reefs are
found scattered, have undergone a depression of some hundreds, or,
it may be, thousands of feet, Mr. Darwin made a supposition which had
nothing forced or improbable, but was entirely in accordance with what
we know to have taken place over similarly extensive areas, in other
periods of the world's history. But Mr. Darwin subjected his hypothesis
to an ingenious indirect test. If his view be correct, it is clear that
neither atolls, nor encircling reefs, should be found in those portions
of the ocean in which we have reason to believe, on independent grounds,
that the sea-bottom has long been either stationary, or slowly rising.
Now it is known that, as a general rule, the level of the land is either
stationary, or is undergoing a slow upheaval, in the neighborhood of
active volcanoes; and, therefore, neither atolls nor encircling reefs
ought to be found in regions in which volcanoes are numerous and active.
And this turns out to be the case. Appended to Mr. Darwin's great work
on coral reefs, there is a map on which atolls and encircling reefs are
indicated by one colour, fringing reefs by another, and active volcanoes
by a third. And it is at once obvious that the lines of active volcanoes
lie around the margins of the areas occupied by the atolls and the
encircling reefs. It is exactly as if the upheaving volcanic agencies
had lifted up the edges of these great areas, while their centres had
undergone a corresponding depression. An atoll area may, in short, be
pictured as a kind of basin, the margins of which have been pushed up by
the subterranean forces, to which the craters of the volcanoes have, at
intervals, given vent.

Thus we must imagine the area of the Pacific now covered by the
Polynesian Archipelago, as having been, at some former time, occupied
by large islands, or, may be, by a great continent, with the ordinarily
diversified surface of plain, and hill, and mountain chain. The shores
of this great land were doubtless fringed by coral reefs; and, as it
slowly underwent depression, the hilly regions, converted into islands,
became, at first, surrounded by fringing reefs, and then, as depression
went on, these became converted into encircling reefs, and these,
finally, into atolls, until a maze of reefs and coral-girdled islets
took the place of the original land masses.

Thus the atolls and the encircling reefs furnish us with clear, though
indirect, evidence of changes in the physical geography of large parts
of the earth's surface; and even, as my lamented friend, the late
Professor Jukes,[124] has suggested, give us indications of the manner
in which some of the most puzzling facts connected with the distribution
of animals have been brought about. For example, Australia and New
Guinea are separated by Torres Straits, a broad belt of sea one hundred
or one hundred and twenty miles wide. Nevertheless, there is in many
respects a curious resemblance between the land animals which inhabit
New Guinea and the land animals which inhabit Australia. But, at the
same time, the marine shellfish which are found in the shallow waters
of the shores of New Guinea are quite different from those which are
met with upon the coasts of Australia. Now, the eastern end of Torres
Straits is full of atolls, which, in fact, form the northern termination
of the Great Barrier Reef which skirts the eastern coast of Australia.
It follows, therefore, that the eastern end of Torres Straits is an
area of depression, and it is very possible, and on many grounds highly
probable, that, in former times, Australia and New Guinea were directly
connected together, and that Torres Straits did not exist. If this were
the case, the existence of cassowaries and of marsupial quadrupeds,
both in New Guinea and in Australia, becomes intelligible; while the
difference between the littoral molluscs of the north and the south
shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by the great probability
that, when the depression in question took place, and what was, at
first, an arm of the sea became converted into a strait separating
Australia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this new sea became
tenanted with marine animals from the north, while the southern shore
was peopled by immigrants from the already existing marine Australian
fauna.

Inasmuch as the growth of the reef depends upon that of successive
generations of coral polypes, and as each generation takes a certain
time to grow to its full size, and can only separate its calcareous
skeleton from the water in which it lives at a certain rate, it is clear
that the reefs are records not only of changes in physical geography,
but of the lapse of time. It is by no means easy, however, to estimate
the exact value of reef chronology, and the attempts which have been
made to determine the rate at which a reef grows vertically have yielded
anything but precise results. A cautious writer, Mr. Dana,[125] whose
extensive study of corals and coral reefs makes him an eminently
competent judge, states his conclusion in the following terms:--

"The rate of growth of the common branching madrepore is not over one
and a half inches a year. As the branches are open, this would not be
equivalent to more than half an inch in height of solid coral for the
whole surface covered by the madrepore; and, as they are also porous,
to not over three-eighths of an inch of solid limestone. But a coral
plantation has large bare patches without corals, and the coral sands
are widely distributed by currents, part of them to depths over one
hundred feet where there are no living corals; not more than one-sixth
of the surface of a reef region is, in fact, covered with growing
species. This reduces the three-eighths to ONE-SIXTEENTH. Shells and
other organic relics may contribute one-fourth as much as corals. At the
outside, the average upward increase of the whole reef-ground per year
would not exceed ONE-EIGHTH of an inch.

"Now some reefs are at least two thousand feet thick, which at
one-eighth of an inch a year, corresponds to one hundred and ninety-two
thousand years."*

     * Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 591.

Halve, or quarter, this estimate if you will, in order to be certain of
erring upon the right side, and still there remains a prodigious
period during which the ancestors of existing coral polypes have
been undisturbedly at work; and during which, therefore, the climatal
conditions over the coral area must have been much what they are now.

And all this lapse of time has occurred within the most recent period of
the history of the earth. The remains of reefs formed by coral polypes
of different kinds from those which exist now, enter largely into the
composition of the limestones of the Jurassic period;[126] and still
more widely different coral polypes have contributed their quota to the
vast thickness of the carboniferous and Devonian strata. Then as regards
the latter group of rocks in America, the high authority already quoted
tells us:--

"The Upper Helderberg period is eminently the coral reef period of the
palaeozoic ages. Many of the rocks abound in coral, and are as truly
coral reefs as the modern reefs of the Pacific. The corals are sometimes
standing on the rocks in the position they had when growing: others are
lying in fragments, as they were broken and heaped by the waves; and
others were reduced to a compact limestone by the finer trituration
before consolidation into rock. This compact variety is the most common
kind among the coral reef rocks of the present seas; and it often
contains but few distinct fossils, although formed in water that
abounded in life. At the fall of the Ohio, near Louisville, there is a
magnificent display of the old reef. Hemispherical Favosites, five or
six feet in diameter, lie there nearly as perfect as when they were
covered by their flowerlike polypes; and besides these, there are
various branching corals, and a profusion of Cyathophyllia, or
cup-corals."*

     * Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 272.

Thus, in all the great periods of the earth's history of which we know
anything, a part of the then living matter has had the form of polypes,
competent to separate from the water of the sea the carbonate of lime
necessary for their own skeletons. Grain by grain, and particle by
particle, they have built up vast masses of rock, the thickness of which
is measured by hundreds of feet, and their area by thousands of square
miles. The slow oscillations of the crust of the earth, producing great
changes in the distribution of land and water, have often obliged
the living matter of the coral-builders to shift the locality of its
operations; and, by variation and adaptation to these modifications of
condition, its forms have as often changed. The work it has done in the
past is, for the most part, swept away, but fragments remain, and, if
there were no other evidence, suffice to prove the general constancy
of the operations of Nature in this world, through periods of almost
inconceivable duration.




NOTES




AUTOBIOGRAPHY

[Footnote 1: Autobiography: Huxley's account of this sketch, written in
1889, is as follows: "A man who is bringing out a series of portraits of
celebrities, with a sketch of their career attached, has bothered me
out of my life for something to go with my portrait, and to escape the
abominable bad taste of some of the notices, I have done that."]

[Footnote 2: pre-Boswellian epoch: the time before Boswell. James
Boswell (1740-1795) wrote the famous Life of Samuel Johnson. Mr. Leslie
Stephen declares that this book "became the first specimen of a new
literary type." "It is a full-length portrait of a man's domestic life
with enough picturesque detail to enable us to see him through the eyes
of private friendship. . . ." A number of biographers since Boswell have
imitated his method; and Leslie Stephen believes that "we owe it in some
degree to his example that we have such delightful books as Lockhart's
Life of Scott or Mr. Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay."]

[Footnote 3: "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit": from Ovid. He who has kept
himself well hidden, has lived well.]

[Footnote 4: Prince George of Cambridge: the grandson of King George
III, second Duke of Cambridge, and Commander-in-chief of the British
Army.]

[Footnote 5: Mr. Herbert Spencer (1820--1903): a celebrated English
philosopher and powerful advocate of the doctrine of evolution. Spencer
is regarded as one of the most profound thinkers of modern times. He was
one of Huxley's closest friends.]

[Footnote 6: in partibus infidelium: in the domain of the unbelievers.]

[Footnote 7: "sweet south upon a bed of violets." Cf. Twelfth Night, Act
I, sc. I, l. 5.

     O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
     That breathes upon a bank of violets,
     Stealing and giving odour.

For the reading "sweet south" instead of "sweet sound," see Rolfe's
edition of Twelfth Night.]

[Footnote 8: "Lehrjahre": apprenticeship.

Charing Cross School of Medicine: a school connected with the Charing
Cross Hospital in the Strand, London.]

[Footnote 9: Nelson: Horatio Nelson, a celebrated English Admiral born
in Norfolk, England, 1758, and died on board the Victory at Trafalgar,
1805. It was before the battle off Cape Trafalgar that Nelson hoisted
his famous signal, "England expects every man will do his duty." Cf.
Tennyson's Ode to the Duke of Wellington, stanza VI, for a famous
tribute to Nelson.]

[Footnote 10: middies: abbreviated form for midshipmen.]

[Footnote 11: Suites a Buffon: sequels to Buffon. Buffon (1707-1781) was
a French naturalist who wrote many volumes on science.]

[Footnote 12: Linnean Society: a scientific society formed in 1788 under
the auspices of several fellows of the Royal Society.]

[Footnote 13: Royal Society: The Royal Society for Improving Natural
Knowledge; the oldest scientific society in Great Britain, and one of
the oldest in Europe. It was founded by Charles II, in 1660, its nucleus
being an association of learned men already in existence. It is supposed
to be identical with the Invisible College which Boyle mentions in 1646.
It was incorporated under the name of The Royal Society in 1661. The
publications of the Royal Society are called Philosophical Transactions.
The society has close connection with the government, and has assisted
the government in various important scientific undertakings among
which may be mentioned Parry's North Pole expedition. The society also
distributes $20,000 yearly for the promotion of scientific research.]

[Footnote 14: Rastignac: a character in Le Pere Goriot. At the close of
the story Rastignac says, "A nous deux, maintenant":--Henceforth there
is war between us.]

[Footnote 15: Pere Goriot: a novel of Balzac's with a plot similar to
King Lear.]

[Footnote 16: Professor Tyndall (1820-1893): a distinguished British
physicist and member of the Royal Society. He explored with Huxley the
glaciers of Switzerland. His work in electricity, radiant heat, light
and acoustics gave him a foremost place in science.]

[Footnote 17: Ecclesiastical spirit: the spirit manifested by the clergy
of England in Huxley's time against the truths of science. The clergy
considered scientific truth to be disastrous to religious truth.
Huxley's attitude toward the teaching of religious truth is illuminated
by this quotation, which he uses to explain his own position: "I have
the fullest confidence that in the reading and explaining of the Bible,
what the children will be taught will be the great truths of Christian
Life and conduct, which all of us desire they should know, and that no
effort will be made to cram into their poor little minds, theological
dogmas which their tender age prevents them from understanding."
Huxley defines his idea of a church as a place in which, "week by
week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract
propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an
ideal of true, just and pure living; a place in which those who are
weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the
contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though
attained by so few; a place in which the man of strife and of business
should have time to think how small, after all, are the rewards he
covets compared with peace and charity."]

[Footnote 18: New Reformation: Huxley writes: "We are in the midst of
a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced the
Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement. . . .
But this organization will be the work of generations of men, and those
who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and
to rest in no verbal delusion."]




ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE (1866)


[Footnote 19: On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge:
from Method and Results: also published in Lay Sermons, Addresses and
Reviews.]

For the history of the times mentioned in this essay, see Green's Short
History of the English People.]

[Footnote 20: The very spot: St. Martin's Borough Hall and Public
Library, on Charing Cross Road, near Trafalgar Square.]

[Footnote 21: Defoe (1661-1731): an English novelist and political
writer. On account of his political writings Defoe was sentenced
to stand in the pillory, and to be "imprisoned during the Queen's
pleasure." During this imprisonment he wrote many articles. Later in
life he wrote Robinson Crusoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll
Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year, and other books less well known.]

[Footnote 22: unholy cursing and crackling wit of the Rochesters and
Sedleys: John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and Sir Charles
Sedley, were both friends of Charles II, and were noted for biting wit
and profligacy. Green, in his Short History of the English People, thus
describes them: "Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles
of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy. Sir
Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made
even the porters in the Covent Garden belt him from the balcony when he
ventured to address them."]

[Footnote 23: Laud: Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud was born in 1573, and
beheaded at London in 1645. He was throughout the reign of Charles I a
staunch supporter of the King. He was impeached by the Long Parliament
in 1640 and executed on Tower Hill, in 1645.]

[Footnote 24: selenography: the scientific study of the moon with
special reference to its physical condition.]

[Footnote 25: Torricellian experiment: a reference to the discovery of
the principle of the barometer by the Italian, Torricelli, in 1643.]

[Footnote 26: Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Bacon endeavored to teach
that civilization cannot be brought to a high point except as man
applies himself to the study of the secrets of nature, and uses
these discoveries for inventions which will give him power over his
environment. The chief value of the work was that it called attention
to the uses of induction and to the experimental study of facts. See
Roger's A Student's History of Philosophy, page 243.]

[Footnote 27: The learned Dr. Wallis (1616-1703): Dr. Wallis is regarded
as the greatest of Newton's predecessors in mathematical history. His
works are numerous and are on a great variety of subjects. He was one of
the first members of the Royal Society.]

[Footnote 28: "New Philosophy": Bacon's ideas on science and philosophy
as set forth in his works.]

[Footnote 29: Royal Society: see note, page 11.]

[Footnote 30: Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1721): a distinguished natural
philosopher of England. Newton was elected a member of the Royal
Society in 1672. His most important scientific accomplishment was the
establishing of the law of universal gravitation. The story of the
fall of the apple was first related by Voltaire to whom it was given by
Newton's niece.]

[Footnote 31: "Philosophical Transactions": the publications of the
Royal Society.]

[Footnote 32: Galileo (1564-1642): a famous Italian astronomer. His most
noted work was the construction of the thermometer and a telescope. He
discovered the satellites of Jupiter in 1610. In 1610, also, he observed
the sun's spots. His views were condemned by the Pope in 1616 and in
1633 he was forced by the Inquisition to abjure the Copernican theory.]

[Footnote 33: Vesalius (1514-1564): a noted Belgian anatomist.]

[Footnote 34: Harvey (1578-1657): an English physiologist and anatomist.
He is noted especially for his discovery of the circulation of the
blood.]

[Footnote 35: Subtle speculations: Selby gives examples from questions
discussed by Thomas Aquinas. Whether all angels belong to the same
genus, whether demons are evil by nature, or by will, whether they can
change one substance into another, . . . whether an angel can move from
one point to another without passing through intermediate space.]

[Footnote 36: Schoolmen: a term used to designate the followers of
scholasticism, a philosophy of dogmatic religion which assumed a certain
subject-matter as absolute and unquestionable. The duty of the Schoolman
was to explain church doctrine; these explanations were characterized
by fine distinctions and by an absence of real content. See Roger's A
Student's History of Philosophy; also Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy
and Psychology.]

[Footnote 37: "writ in water": an allusion to Keats' request that the
words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" be his epitaph. The
words are inscribed on his tomb in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome.]

[Footnote 38: Lord Brouncker: The first president of the Royal Society
after its incorporation in 1662 was Lord Brouneker.]

[Footnote 39: revenant: ghost.]

[Footnote 40: Boyle: Robert Boyle (1627-1691): a British chemist and
natural philosopher who was noted especially for his discovery of
Boyle's law of the elasticity of air.]

[Footnote 41: Evelyn (1620-1706): an English author and member of the
Royal Society. His most important work is the Diary, valuable for the
full account which it gives of the manners and customs of the time.]

[Footnote 42: The Restoration: In English history the re-establishing
of the English monarchy with the return of King Charles II in 1660;
by extension the whole reign of Charles II: as, the dramatists of the
Restoration. Century Dictionary.]

[Footnote 43: Aladdin's lamps: a reference to the story of the Wonderful
Lamp in the Arabian Nights. The magic lamp brought marvelous good
fortune to the poor widow's son who possessed it. Cf. also Lowell's
Aladdin:--

     When I was a beggarly boy,
     And lived in a cellar damp,
     I had not a friend or a toy,
     But I had Aladdin's lamp;
     When I could not sleep for the cold,
     I had fire enough in my brain,
     And builded, with roofs of gold,
     My beautiful castles in Spain!]

[Footnote 44: "When in heaven the stars": from Tennyson's Specimens of a
Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse.]

[Footnote 45: "increasing God's honour and bettering man's estate":
Bacon's statement of his purpose in writing the Advancement of
Learning.]

[Footnote 46: For example, etc.: could the sentence beginning thus be
written in better form?]

[Footnote 47: Rumford (1738-1814): Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, an
eminent scientist. Rumford was born in America and educated at Harvard.
Suspected of loyalty to the King at the time of the revolution, he was
imprisoned. Acquitted, he went to England where he became prominent in
politics and science. Invested with the title of Count by the Holy Roman
Empire, he chose Rumford for his title after the name of the little
New Hampshire town where he had taught. He gave a large sum of money to
Harvard College to found the Rumford professorship of science.]

[Footnote 48: eccentric: out of the centre.]




A LIBERAL EDUCATION (1868)


[Footnote 49: A Liberal Education: from Science and Education; also
published in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews.]

[Footnote 50: Ichabod: cf. 1 Sam. iv, 21.]

[Footnote 51: senior wranglership: in Cambridge University, England,
one who has attained the first class in the elementary division of the
public examination for honors in pure and mixed mathematics, commonly
called the mathematical tripos, those who compose the second rank of
honors being designated senior optimes, and those of the third order
junior optimes. The student taking absolutely the first place in the
mathematical tripos used to be called senior wrangler, those following
next in the same division being respectively termed second, third,
fourth, etc., wranglers. Century Dictionary.]

[Footnote 52: double-first: any candidate for the degree of Bachelor of
Arts in Oxford University who takes first-class honors in both classics
and mathematics is said to have won a double-first.]

[Footnote 53: Retzsch (1779-1857): a well-known German painter and
engraver.]

[Footnote 54: Test-Act: an English statute of 1673. It compelled all
persons holding office under the crown to take the oaths of supremacy
and of allegiance, to receive the sacrament according to the usage
of the Church of England, and to subscribe to the Declaration against
Transubstantiation.]

[Footnote 55: Poll: an abbreviation and transliteration of [Footnote
Greek words], "the mob"; university slang for the whole body of students
taking merely the degree of Bachelor of Arts, at Cambridge.]

[Footnote 56: pluck: the rejection of a student, after examinations, who
does not come up to the standard.]




ON A PIECE OF CHALK


[Footnote 57: On a Piece of Chalk: a lecture to working-men from Lay
Sermons, Addresses and Reviews.]

[Footnote 58: Needles of the Isle of Wight: the needles are three
white, pointed rocks of chalk, resting on dark-colored bases, and
rising abruptly from the sea to a height of 100 feet. Baedeker's Great
Britain.]

[Footnote 59: Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head: Lulworth is on
the southern coast of England, west of the Isle of Wight: Flamborough
Head is on the northeastern coast of England and extends into the German
Ocean.]

[Footnote 60: Weald: a name given to an oval-shaped chalk area in
England, beginning near the Straits of Dover, and extending into the
counties of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Sussex.]

[Footnote 61: Lieut. Brooke: Brooke devised an apparatus for deep-sea
sounding from which the weight necessary to sink the instrument rapidly,
was detached when it reached the bottom. The object was to relieve the
strain on the rope caused by rapid soundings. Improved apparatuses have
been invented since the time of Brooke.]

[Footnote 62: Ehrenberg (1795-1876): a German naturalist noted for his
studies of Infusoria.]

[Footnote 63: Bailey of West Point (1811-1857): an American naturalist
noted for his researches in microscopy.]

[Footnote 64: enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable: the first
Atlantic telegraph-cable between England and America was laid in 1858 by
Cyrus W. Field of New York. Messages were sent over it for a few weeks;
then it ceased to act. A permanent cable was laid by Mr. Field in 1866.]

[Footnote 65: Dr. Wallich (1786-1854): a Danish botanist and member of
the Royal Society.]

[Footnote 66: Mr. Sorby: President of the Geological Society of
England, and author of many papers on subjects connected with physical
geography.]

[Footnote 67: Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875): a British geologist, and
one of the first to uphold Darwin's Origin of Species.]

[Footnote 68: Echinus: the sea-urchin; an animal which dwells in a
spheroidal shell built up from polygonal plates, and covered with sharp
spines.]

[Footnote 69: Somme: a river of northern France which flows into the
English Channel northeast of Dieppe.]

[Footnote 70: the chipped flints of Hoxne and Amiens: the rude
instruments which were made by primitive man were of chipped flint.
Numerous discoveries of large flint implements have been made in the
north of France, near Amiens, and in England. The first noted flint
implements were discovered in Hoxne, Suffolk, England, 1797. Cf. Evans'
Ancient Stone Implements and Lyell's Antiquity of Man.]

[Footnote 71: Rev. Mr. Gunn (1800-1881): an English naturalist. Mr.
Gunn sent from Tasmania a large number of plants and animals now in the
British Museum.]

[Footnote 72: "the whirligig of time": cf. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night,
Act V, se. I, l. 395.]

[Footnote 73: Euphrates and Hiddekel: cf. Genesis ii, 14.]

[Footnote 74: the great river, the river of Babylon: cf. Genesis xv, 18]

[Footnote 75: Without haste, but without rest: from Goethe's Zahme
Xenien. In a letter to his sister, Huxley says: "And then perhaps by the
following of my favorite motto,--

     "'Wie das Gestirn,
     Ohne Hast,
     Ohne Rast'--

     something may be done, and some of Sister Lizzie's fond
     imaginations turn out not altogether untrue."  The quotation entire
     is as follows:--

     Wie das Gestirn,
     Ohne Hast,
     Aber ohne Rast,
     Drehe sich jeder
     Um die eigne Last.]




THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION (1882)


[Footnote 76: The Principal Subjects of Education: an extract from the
essay, Science and Art in Relation to Education.]

[Footnote 77: this discussion: "this" refers to the last sentence in the
preceding paragraph, in which Huxley says that it will be impossible to
determine the amount of time to be given to the principal subjects
of education until it is determined "what the principal subjects of
education ought to be."]

[Footnote 78: Francis Bacon: cf. note [Footnote 26].]

[Footnote 79: the best chance of being happy: In connection with
Huxley's work on the London School Board, his biographer says that
Huxley did not regard "intellectual training only from the utilitarian
point of view; he insisted, e. g., on the value of reading for amusement
as one of the most valuable uses to hardworked people."]

[Footnote 80: "Harmony in grey": cf. with l. 34 in Browning's Andrea del
Sarto.]

[Footnote 81: Hobbes (1588-1679): noted for his views of human nature
and of politics. According to Minto, "The merits ascribed to his style
are brevity, simplicity and precision."]

[Footnote 82: Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753): an Irish prelate noted for
his philosophical writings and especially for his theory of vision which
was the foundation for modern investigations of the subject. "His style
has always been esteemed admirable; simple, felicitous and sweetly
melodious. His dialogues are sustained with great skill." Minto's Manual
of English Prose Literature.]

[Footnote 83: We have been recently furnished with in prose: The Iliad
of Homer translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers, the first edition of
which appeared in 1882, is probably the one to which Huxley refers. The
Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang, appeared in 1879. Among the
best of the more recent translations of Homer are the Odyssey by George
Herbert Palmer; the Iliad by Arthur S. Way, and the Odyssey by the same
author.]

[Footnote 84: Locke (1632-1704): an English philosopher of great
influence. His chief work is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.]

[Footnote 85: Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit: thus Francis Bacon
thought.]




THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION (1863)


[Footnote 86: The Method of Scientific Investigation is an extract
from the third of six lectures given to workingmen on The Causes of the
Phenomena of Organic Nature in Darwiniana.]

[Footnote 87: these terrible apparatus: apparatus is the form for both
the singular and plural; apparatuses is another form for the plural.]

[Footnote 88: Incident in one of Moliere's plays: the allusion is to the
hero, M. Jourdain in the play, "La Bourgeois Gentilbomme."]

[Footnote 89: these kind: modern writers regard kind as singular.
Shakespeare treated it as a plural noun, as "These kind of knaves I
knew."]

[Footnote 90: Newton: cf. [Footnote 30].]

[Footnote 91: Laplace (1749-1827): a celebrated French astronomer and
mathematician. He is best known for his theory of the formation of the
planetary systems, the so-called "nebular hypothesis." Until recently
this hypothesis has generally been accepted in its main outlines. It
is now being supplanted by the "Spiral Nebular Hypothesis" developed
by Professors Moulton and Chamberlin of the University of Chicago. See
Moulton's Introduction to Astronomy, p. 463.]




ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE (1868)


[Footnote 92: On the Physical Basis of Life: from Methods and Results;
also published in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. "The substance of
this paper was contained in a discourse which was delivered in Edinburgh
on the evening of Sunday, the 8th of November, 1868--being the first
of a series of Sunday evening addresses upon non-theological topics,
instituted by the Rev. J. Cranbrook. Some phrases, which could possess
only a transitory and local interest, have been omitted; instead of
the newspaper report of the Archbishop of York's address, his Grace's
subsequently published pamphlet On the Limits of Philosophical inquiry
is quoted, and I have, here and there, endeavoured to express my meaning
more fully and clearly than I seem to have done in speaking--if I may
judge by sundry criticisms upon what I am supposed to have said, which
have appeared. But in substance, and, so far as my recollection
serves, in form, what is here written corresponds with what was there
said."--Huxley.]

[Footnote 93: Finner whale: a name given to a whale which has a dorsal
fin. A Finner whale commonly measures from 60 to 90 feet in length.]

[Footnote 94: A fortiori: with stronger reason: still more
conclusively.]

[Footnote 95: well-known epigram: from Goethe's Venetianische Epigramme.
The following is a translation of the passage: Why do the people push
each other and shout? They want to work for their living, bring forth
children; and feed them as well as they possibly can. . . . No man can
attain to more, however much he may pretend to the contrary.]

[Footnote 96: Maelstroms: a celebrated whirlpool or violent current in
the Arctic Ocean, near the western coast of Norway, between the islands
of Moskenaso and Mosken, formerly supposed to suck in and destroy
everything that approached it at any time, but now known not to be
dangerous except under certain conditions. Century Dictionary. Cf. also
Poe's Descent into the Maelstrom.]

[Footnote 97: Milne-Edwards (1800-1885): a French naturalist. His
Elements de Zoologie won him a great reputation.]

[Footnote 98: with such qualifications as arises: a typographical
error.]

[Footnote 99: De Bary (1831-1888): a German botanist noted especially
for his researches in cryptogamic botany.]

[Footnote 100: No Man's Land: Huxley probably intends no specific
geographical reference. The expression is common as a designation of
some remote and unfrequented locality.]

[Footnote 101: Kuhne (1837-1900): a German physiologist and professor of
science at Amsterdam and Heidelberg.]

[Footnote 102: Debemur morti nos nostraque: Horace--Ars Poetica, line
63.

     As forests change their foliage year by year,
     Leaves, that come first, first fall and disappear;
     So antique words die out, and in their room,
     Others spring up, of vigorous growth and bloom;
     Ourselves and all that's ours, to death are due,
     And why should words not be mortal too?

Martin's translation.]

[Footnote 103: peau de chagrin: skin of a wild ass.]

[Footnote 104: Balzac (1799-1850): a celebrated French novelist of the
realistic school of fiction.]

[Footnote 105: Barmecide feast: the allusion is to a story in the
Arabian Nights in which a member of the Barmecide family places a
succession of empty dishes before a beggar, pretending that they contain
a rich repast.]

[Footnote 106: modus operandi: method of working.]

[Footnote 107: Martinus Scriblerus: a reference to Memoirs of Martinus
Scriblerus written principally by John Arbuthnot, and published in
1741. The purpose of the papers is given by Warburton and Spence in
the following extracts quoted from the Preface to the Memoirs of the
Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus in
Elwin and Courthope's edition of Pope's works, vol. x, p. 273:-- "Mr.
Pope, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Dr. Swift, in conjunction, formed the project
of a satire on the abuses of human learning; and to make it better
received, proposed to execute it in the manner of Cervantes (the
original author of this species of satire) under a continued narrative
of feigned adventures. They had observed that those abuses still kept
their ground against all that the ablest and gravest authors could say
to discredit them; they concluded, therefore, the force of ridicule was
wanting to quicken their disgrace; and ridicule was here in its place,
when the abuses had been already detected by sober reasoning; and
truth in no danger to suffer by the premature use of so powerful an
instrument."]

"The design of this work, as stated by Pope himself, is to ridicule all
the false tastes in learning under the character of a man of capacity
enough, that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously
in each. It was begun by a club of some of the greatest wits of the
age--Lord Oxford, the Bishop of Rochester, Pope, Congreve, Swift,
Arbuthnot, and others. Gay often held the pen; and Addison liked it very
well, and was not disinclined to come into it."]

[Footnote 108: accounted for the operation of the meat-jack: from the
paper "To the learned inquisitor into nature, Martinus Scriblerus: the
society of free thinkers greeting." Elwin and Courthope, Pope's works,
vol. ?, p. 332.]

[Footnote 109: The remainder of the essay endeavors to meet the charge
of materialism. The following is the conclusion:--"In itself it is of
little moment whether we express the phaenomena of matter in terms of
spirit; or the phaenomena of spirit in terms of matter: matter may be
regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of
matter--each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to
the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way
to be preferred. For it connects thought with the other phaenomena of
the universe, and suggests inquiry into the nature of those physical
conditions, or concomitants of thought, which are more or less
accessible to us, and a knowledge of which may, in future, help us
to exercise the same kind of control over the world of thought, as
we already possess in respect of the material world; whereas, the
alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly barren, and leads
to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas.

"Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science advances, the
more extensively and consistently will all the phaenomena of Nature
be represented by materialistic formulae and symbols. But the man of
science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides
from these formulae and symbols into what is commonly understood
by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the
mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works
his problems, for real entities--and with this further disadvantage, as
compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of
no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may
paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty of a life."]




ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS (1870)


[Footnote 110: On Coral and Coral Reefs: from Critiques and Addresses.
The essay was published in 1870.]

[Footnote 111: Sic et curalium: Thus also the coral, as soon as it
touches the air turns hard. It was a soft plant under the water.]

[Footnote 112: Boccone (1633-1704): a noted Sicilian naturalist.]

[Footnote 113: Marsigli (1658-1730): an Italian soldier and naturalist.
He wrote A Physical History of the Sea.]

[Footnote 114: "Traite du Corail": "I made the coral bloom in vases full
of sea-water, and I noticed that what we believe to be the flower of
this so-called plant was in reality only an insect similar to a little
nettle or polype. I had the pleasure to see the paws or feet of this
nettle move, and having placed the vase full of water in which the coral
was, near the fire, at a moderate heat, all the little insects expanded,
the nettle stretched out its feet and formed what M. de Marsigli and
I had taken for the petals of the flower. The calyx of this so-called
flower is the very body of the animal issued from its cell."]

[Footnote 115: Reaumur (1683-1757): a French physiologist and
naturalist, best known as the inventor of the Reaumur thermometer. He
was a member of the French Academy of Science.]

[Footnote 116: Bishop Wilson: Thomas Wilson (1663-1755), bishop of the
Isle of Man. Details of his life are given in the folio edition of his
works (1782). An appreciation of his religious writings is given by
Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. Bishop Wilson's words, "To make
reason and the will of God prevail," are the theme of Arnold's essay,
Sweetness and Light.]

[Footnote 117: An eminent modern writer: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888),
eldest son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby; a distinguished critic
and poet, and professor of poetry at Oxford. The allusion is to Arnold's
essay, Sweetness and Light. The phrase, "sweetness and light," is
one which Aesop uses in Swift's Battle of the Books to sum up the
superiority of the ancients over the moderns. "As for us, the ancients,
we are content, with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond
our wings and our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language;
for the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor and
search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is,
that instead of dirt and poison we have rather chose to fill our hives
with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things,
which are sweetness and light." Arnold's purpose in the essay is
to define the cultured man as one who endeavors to make beauty and
intelligence prevail everywhere.]

[Footnote 118: Abbe Trembley (1700-1784): a Swiss naturalist. He wrote
"Memoires pour servir a l'histoire d'un genre de polypes d'eau douce, a
bras en forme de cornes."]

[Footnote 119: Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1776): a French botanist;
founder of the natural classification of plants. He was superintendent
of the Trianon Gardens.]

[Footnote 120: Guettard (1715-1786): a French naturalist.]

[Footnote 121: Monte Nuovo within the old crater of Somma: Monte Nuovo,
a mountain west of Naples; Somma, a mountain north of Vesuvius which
with its lofty, semicircular cliff encircles the active cone of
Vesuvius.]

[Footnote 122: Mauritius: an island in the Indian Ocean; Huxley visited
the island when on the voyage with the Rattlesnake. He wrote to his
mother of his visit: "This island is, you know, the scene of Saint
Pierre's beautiful story of Paul and Virginia, over which I suppose most
people have sentimentalized at one time or another of their lives.
Until we reached here I did not know that the tale was like the lady's
improver--a fiction founded on fact, and that Paul and Virginia were at
one time flesh and blood, and that their veritable dust was buried at
Pamplemousses in a spot considered as one of the lions of the place, and
visited as classic ground."]

[Footnote 123: Mr. Darwin's coral reefs: The Structure and Distribution
of Coral Reefs, published in 1848.]

[Footnote 124: Professor Jukes (1811-1869): an English geologist.]

[Footnote 125: Mr. Dana (1813-1895): a well-known American geologist and
mineralogist; a professor at Yale from 1845. He wrote a number of books
among which is Coral and Coral Reefs.]

[Footnote 126: Jurassic period: that part of the geological series which
is older than the Cretaceous and newer than the Triassic; so called from
the predominance of rocks of this age in the Jura Mountains. The three
great divisions of fossiliferous rocks are called the Triassic, the
Jurassic, and the Cretaceous.]




REFERENCE BOOKS


The following reference books are suggested for a more complete
treatment of various points in the text:--Andrews' History of England.
Green's Short History of the English People. Traill's Social England.
Roger's A Student's History of Philosophy. Royce's The Spirit of
Modern Philosophy. Huxley's Life and Letters. Smalley's Mr. Huxley, in
Scribner's Magazine for October, 1905. Darwin's Life and Letters.