It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth: "Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid down. We progress as we comply."
n Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon another."
The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.
It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in love with her.
Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant sloop would answer her—when he got his surgeon's commission she would marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas Huxley loved but one.
Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.
In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the woman marries a man like Huxley."
here is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.