The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Present Condition of Organic Nature, by
Thomas H. Huxley

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Title: The Present Condition of Organic Nature
Lecture I. (of VI.), Lectures To Working Men, at the Museum
of Practical Geology, 1863, On Darwin's work: "Origin of
Species".

Author: Thomas H. Huxley

Posting Date: January 4, 2009 [EBook #2921]
Release Date: November, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE ***

Produced by Amy E. Zelmer

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE

Lecture I. (of VI.), "Lectures To Working Men", at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863,
On Darwin's work: "Origin of Species".

By Thomas H. Huxley

EDITOR'S NOTE

Of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley,
son of an Ealing schoolmaster, was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His
researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his
pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably
had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And
yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that
his father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of
education. "I had," he said, "two years of a pandemonium of a school
(between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any
intellectual direction till I reached manhood." When he was twelve a
craving for reading found satisfaction in Hutton's "Geology," and when
fifteen in Hamilton's "Logic."

At seventeen Huxley entered as a student at Charing Cross Hospital, and
three years later he was M.B. and the possessor of the gold medal for
anatomy and physiology. An appointment as surgeon in the navy proved to
be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career, for he was gazetted to
the "Rattlesnake", commissioned for surveying work in Torres Straits. He
was attracted by the teeming surface life of tropical seas and his study
of it was the commencement of that revolution in scientific knowledge
ultimately brought about by his researches.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, and died at