Lectures and Essays

Of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley, son of an Ealing schoolmaster, was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And yet he was a self-made intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of education. I had, he said, two years of a pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till I reached manhood. When he was twelve a craving for reading found satisfaction in Hutton's Geology, and when fifteen in Hamilton's Logic.
At seventeen Huxley entered as a student at Charing Cross Hospital, and three years later he was M.B. and the possessor of the gold medal for anatomy and physiology. An appointment as surgeon in the navy proved to be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career, for he was gazetted to the Rattlesnake , commissioned for surveying work in Torres Straits. He was attracted by the teeming surface life of tropical seas and his study of it was the commencement of that revolution in scientific knowledge ultimately brought about by his researches.
Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, and died at Eastbourne June 29, 1895.
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The Publisher of these interesting Lectures, having made an arrangement for their publication with Mr. J.A. Mays, the Reporter, begs to append the following note from Professor Huxley:—
Mr. J. Aldous Mays, who is taking shorthand notes of my 'Lectures to Working Men,' has asked me to allow him, on his own account, to print those Notes for the use of my audience. I willingly accede to this request, on the understanding that a notice is prefixed to the effect that I have no leisure to revise the Lectures, or to make alterations in them, beyond the correction of any important error in a matter of fact.