Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

Of his childhood little is recorded. He remembers being vain of his curls, and his mother's expressed regret that he soon lost the beauty of early childhood. He attended for some time the school at Ealing with which his father was associated, but he has little to say for the training he received there. He writes:

"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 which I had with one of my class-mates, 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 my 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. 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 enquiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not only been 'sent out,' but had undergone more than one colonial conviction."

Huxley was soon removed from school and continued his own education for several years, by reading of the most desultory sort. His special inclinations were towards mechanical problems, and had he been able to follow his own wishes there is little doubt but that he would have entered on the profession of an engineer. It is probable that there was a great deal more in his wishes than the familiar inclination of a clever boy to engineering. All through the pursuit of anatomy, which was the chief business of his life, it was the structure of animals, the different modifications of great ground-plans which they presented, that interested him. But the opportunity for engineering did not present itself, and at an exceedingly early age he began to study medicine. Two brothers-in-law were doctors, and this accidental fact probably determined his choice. In these days the study of medicine did not begin as now with a general and scientific education, but the young medical student was apprenticed to a doctor engaged in practice. He was supposed to learn the compounding of drugs in the dispensary attached to the doctor's consulting-room; to be taught the dressing of wounds and the superficial details of the medical craft while he pursued his studies in anatomy under the direction of the doctor. Huxley's master was his brother-in-law, Dr. Salt, a London practitioner, and he began his work when only twelve or thirteen years of age. In this system everything depended upon the superior; under the careful guidance of a conscientious and able man it was possible for an apt pupil to learn a great deal of science and to become an expert in the treatment of disease. Huxley, however, had only a short experience of this kind of training. He was taken by some senior student friends to a post-mortem examination, and although then, as all through his life, he was most sensitive to the disagreeable side of anatomical pursuits, on this occasion he gratified his curiosity too ardently. He did not cut himself, but in some way poisonous matter from the body affected him, and he fell into so bad a state of health that he had to be sent into the country to recruit. He lived for some time at a farmhouse in Warwickshire with friends of his father and slowly recovered health. From that time, however, all through his life, he suffered periodically from prostrating dyspepsia. After some months devoted to promiscuous reading he resumed his work under his brother-in-law in London. He confesses that he was far from a model student.

"I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did not,—which was a 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 speedily."

It is almost certain, however, that Huxley underestimated the value of this time. He stored his mind with both literature and science, and laid the foundation of the extremely varied intellectual interests which afterwards proved to him of so much value. It is certain, also, that during this time he acquired a fair knowledge of French and German. It would be difficult to exaggerate the value to him of this addition to his weapons for attacking knowledge. To do the best work in any scientific pursuit it is necessary to freshen one's own mind by contact with the ideas and results of other workers. As these workers are scattered over different countries it is necessary to transcend the confusion of Babel and read what they write in their own tongues. When Huxley was young, the great reputation of Cuvier overshadowed English anatomy, and English anatomists did little more than seek in nature what Cuvier had taught them to find. In Germany other men and other ideas were to be found. Johannes Mueller and Von Baer were attacking the problems of nature in a spirit that was entirely different, and Huxley, by combining what he was taught in England with what he learned from German methods, came to his own investigations with a wider mind. But his conquest of French and German brought with it advantages in addition to these technical gains. There is no reason to believe that he troubled himself with grammatical details and with the study of these languages as subjects in themselves. He acquired them simply to discover the new ideas concealed in them, and he by no means confined himself to the reading of foreign books on the subjects of his own studies. He read French and German poetry, literature, and philosophy, and so came to have a knowledge of the ideas of those outside his own race on all the great problems that interest mankind. A good deal has been written as to the narrowing tendency of scientific pursuits, but with Huxley, as with all the scientific men the present writer has known, the mechanical necessity of learning to read other languages has brought with it that wide intellectual sympathy which is the beginning of all culture and which is not infrequently missed by those who have devoted themselves to many grammars and a single literature. The old proverb, "Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well," has only value when "well" is properly interpreted. Although the science of language is as great as any science, it is not the science of language, but the practical interpretation of it, that is of value to most people, and there is much to be said for the method of anatomists like Huxley, who passed lightly over grammatical minutiæ and went straight with a dictionary to the reading of each new tongue.

After a short period of apprenticeship, or sometimes during the course of it, the young medical students "walked" a hospital. This consisted in attending the demonstrations of the physicians and surgeons in the wards of the hospital and in pursuing anatomical, chemical, and physiological study in the medical school attached to the hospital. A large fee was charged for the complete course, but at many of the hospitals there were entrance scholarships which relieved those who gained them of all cost. In 1842 Huxley and his elder brother, James, applied for such free scholarships at Charing Cross Hospital. There is no record in the books of the hospital as to what persons supported the application. The entry in the minutes for September 6, 1842, states that

"Applications from the following gentlemen (including the two sons of Mr. George Huxley, late senior assistant master in Ealing School), were laid before the meeting, and their testimonials being approved of, it was decided that those gentlemen should be admitted as free scholars, if their classical attainments should be found upon examination to be satisfactory."

It appears that the two Huxleys were able to satisfy the probably unexacting demands of the classical examiners, for they began their hospital work in October of the same year.

Those who know the magnificent laboratories and lecture-rooms which have grown up in connection with the larger London hospitals must have difficulty in realising the humble arrangements for teaching students in the early forties. What endowments there were—and Charing Cross was never a richly endowed hospital—were devoted entirely to the hospital as opposed to the teaching school. There were no separate buildings for anatomy, physiology, and so forth. At Charing Cross the dissecting-room was in a cellar under the hospital, and subjects like chemistry, botany, physiology, and so forth were crowded into inconvenient side rooms. The teachers were not specialists, devoting their whole attention to particular branches of science, but were doctors engaged in practice, who, in addition to their private duties and their work at the hospital, each undertook to lecture upon a special scientific subject. Huxley came specially under the influence of Mr. Wharton Jones, who had begun to teach physiology at the hospital a year before. Mr. Jones throughout his life was engaged in professional work, his specialty being ophthalmic surgery, but he was a devoted student of anatomy and physiology, and made several classical contributions to scientific knowledge, his best-known discoveries relating to blood corpuscles and to the nature of the mammalian egg-cell. But perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that it was he who first imbued Huxley with a love for anatomical science and with a knowledge of the methods of investigation. At the end of his first session, in 1843, Huxley received the first prize in the senior physiology class, while his brother got a "good conduct" prize. Of Wharton Jones Huxley writes: