Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man, she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons," her son used to say.
College education was not for that goodly brood—a living was the first thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.
Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial, difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.
Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday. Tomorrow will be the result of today.
The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.
Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.
To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work on barnacles.
Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man. That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.
Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo at a certain stage.
And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus: "The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.