CHAPTER 1.14. 1859-1860.

CHAPTER 1.15. 1860-1863.

CHAPTER 1.16. 1860-1861.

CHAPTER 1.17. 1861-1863.

CHAPTER 1.18. 1864.

CHAPTER 1.19. 1865.

CHAPTER 1.20. 1866.

CHAPTER 1.21. 1867.

CHAPTER 1.22. 1868.

CHAPTER 1.23. 1869.

...

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PLATE 1. PORTRAIT OF T.H. HUXLEY FROM A DAGUERROTYPE MADE IN 1846.

PLATE 2. FACSIMILE OF SKETCH, "THE LOVES AND GRACES."

PLATE 3. PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MAULL AND POLYBLANK, 1857.

PLATE 4. NUMBER 4 MARLBOROUGH PLACE--FROM THE GARDEN. AFTER A WATERCOLOUR SKETCH BY R. HUXLEY.

PLATE 5. PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT AND FRY; STEEL ENGRAVING IN "NATURE," FEBRUARY 5, 1874.

CHAPTER 1.1.

1825-1842.

[In the year 1825 Ealing was as quiet a country village as could be found within a dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Here stood a large semi-public school, which had risen to the front rank in numbers and reputation under Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford, who in 1791 became the son-in-law and successor of the previous master.

The senior assistant-master in this school was George Huxley, a tall, dark, rather full-faced man, quick tempered, and distinguished, in his son's words, by "that glorious firmness which one's enemies called obstinacy." In the year 1810 he had married Rachel Withers; she bore five sons and three daughters, of whom one son and one daughter died in infancy; the seventh and youngest surviving child was Thomas Henry.

George Huxley, the master at Ealing, was the second son of Thomas Huxley and Margaret James, who were married at St. Michael's, Coventry, on September 8, 1773. This Thomas Huxley continued to live at Coventry until his death in January 1796, when he left behind him a large family and no very great wealth. The most notable item in the latter is the "capital Messuage, by me lately purchased of Mrs. Ann Thomas," which he directs to be sold to pay his debts--an inn, apparently, for the testator is described as a victualler. Family tradition tells that he came to Coventry from Lichfield, and if so, he and his sons after him exemplify the tendency to move south, which is to be observed in those of the same name who migrated from their original home in Cheshire. This home is represented to-day by a farm in the Wirral, about eight miles from Chester, called Huxley Hall. From this centre Huxleys spread to the neighbouring villages, such as Overton and Eccleston, Clotton and Duddon, Tattenhall and Wettenhall; others to Chester and Brindley near Nantwich. The southward movement carries some to the Welsh border, others into Shropshire. The Wettenhall family established themselves in the fourth generation at Rushall, and held property in Handsworth and Walsall; the Brindley family sent a branch to Macclesfield, whose representative, Samuel, must have been on the town council when the Young Pretender rode through on his way to Derby, for he was mayor in 1746; while at the end of the sixteenth century, George, the disinherited heir of Brindley, became a merchant in London, and purchased Wyre Hall at Edmonton, where his descendants lived for four generations, his grandson being knighted by Charles II in 1663.

But my father had no particular interest in tracing his early ancestry. "My own genealogical inquiries," he said, "have taken me so far back that I confess the later stages do not interest me." Towards the end of his life, however, my mother persuaded him to see what could be found out about Huxley Hall and the origin of the name. This proved to be from the manor of Huxley or Hodesleia, whereof one Swanus de Hockenhull was enfeoffed by the abbot and convent of St. Werburgh in the time of Richard I. Of the grandsons of this Swanus, the eldest kept the manor and name of Hockenhull (which is still extant in the Midlands); the younger ones took their name from the other fief.

But the historian of Cheshire records the fact that owing to the respectability of the name, it was unlawfully assumed by divers "losels and lewd fellows of the baser sort," and my father, with a fine show of earnestness, used to declare that he was certain the legitimate owners of the name were far too sober and respectable to have produced such a reprobate as himself, and one of these "losels" must be his progenitor.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, "about eight o'clock in the morning." (So in the Autobiography, but 9.30 according to the Family Bible.) "I am not aware," he tells us playfully in his Autobiography, "that any portents preceded my arrival in this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement."

As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he writes as follows:--]

Physically I am the son of my mother so completely--even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes of her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it; things flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother-wit.

[Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at sixty-six "as active and energetic as a young woman." His early devotion to her was remarkable. Describing her to his future wife he writes:--]

As a child my love for her was a passion. I have lain awake for hours crying because I had a morbid fear of her death; her approbation was my greatest reward, her displeasure my greatest punishment.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood (he continues in the Autobiography). In later years my mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country folk, because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning when the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most part remained in a latent state.

[There remains no record of his having been a very precocious child. Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companionship with his elders wins him this reputation. The youngest remains a child among children longer than any other of his brothers and sisters.

One talent, however, displayed itself early. The faculty of drawing he inherited from his father. But on the queer principle that training is either unnecessary to natural capacity or even ruins it, he never received regular instruction in drawing; and his draughtsmanship, vigorous as it was, and a genuine medium of artistic expression as well as an admirable instrument in his own especial work, never reached the technical perfection of which it was naturally capable.

The amount of instruction, indeed of any kind, which he received was scanty in the extreme. For a couple of years, from the age of eight to ten, he was given a taste of the unreformed public school life, where, apart from the rough and ready mode of instruction in vogue and the necessary obedience enforced to certain rules, no means were taken to reach the boys themselves, to guide them and help them in their school life. The new-comer was left to struggle for himself in a community composed of human beings at their most heartlessly cruel age, untempered by any external influence.