And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened to be vacant.
From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in demand.
He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society; and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.
In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of Her Majesty's Navy."
Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.
Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and colleges.
Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach. To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.
The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was intellectually base.
He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric stage.
Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."