t first
hand the writings of other nations, he learned German, French, Italian,
and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning to read Greek was to
see for himself if Aristotle really did say that the heart had only
three chambers--an error, he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the
translator. It was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him
impatient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own work has
all the breadth and freedom and universality of the scholar, but it has,
also, a quality equally distinctive of the scholar, namely, an infinite
precision in the matter of detail.

If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, also, a courageous
fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it, was to seek the truth;
his second was to teach it to others, and, if necessary, to contend
valiantly for it. To fail to teach what you honestly know to be true,
because it may harm your reputation, or even because it may give pain to
others, is cowardice. "I am not greatly concerned about any reputation,"
Huxley writes to his wife, "except that of being entirely honest and
straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publication of Man's
Place in Nature would ruin his career, Huxley passed on to others what
nature had revealed to him. He was regardless, also, of the confusion
and pain which his view would necessarily bring to those who had been
nourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or two and to do battle
with the world on the score of its old beliefs, has never been an easy
task since the world began. Certainly it required fearlessness and
determination to wrestle with the prejudices against science in the
middle of the nineteenth century--how much may be gathered from the
reading of Darwin's Life and Letters. The attitude of the times toward
science has already been indicated. One may be allowed to give one more
example from the reported address of a clergyman. "O ye men of science,
ye men of science, leave us our ancestors in paradise, and you may have
yours in Zoological gardens." The war was, for the most part, between
the clergy and the men of science, but it is necessary to remember
that Huxley fought not against Christianity, but against dogma; that
he fought not against the past,--he had great reverence for the
accomplishment of the past,--but against unwillingness to accept the new
truth of the present.

A scholar of the highest type and a fearless defender of true and honest
thinking, H