o face p._102

I

INTRODUCTORY

The object of a full-dress biography is to present as complete
a picture as may be of a man and his work, the influence of his
character upon his achievement, the struggle with opposing influences
to carry out some guiding purpose or great idea. With abundant
documents at hand the individual development, the action of events
upon character, and of character upon events, can be shown in the
spontaneous freedom of letters, as well as in considered publications.
But this little book is not a full-dress biography, although it may
induce readers to turn to the larger _Life and Letters_, in which
(or in the _Aphorisms and Reflections of T.H. Huxley_) facts and
quotations can be turned up by means of the index; it is designed
rather as a character sketch, to show not so much the work done as
what manner of man Huxley was, and the spirit in which he undertook
that work. It will not be a history of his scientific investigations
or his philosophical researches; it will be personal, while from the
personal side illustrating his attitude towards his scientific and
philosophical thought.

II

EARLY DAYS

Thomas Henry Huxley was born ten years after Waterloo, while the
country was still in the backwash of the long-drawn Napoleonic wars.
It was a time of material reconstruction and expansion, while social
reconstruction lagged sadly and angrily behind. The year of his birth
saw the first railway opened in England; it was seven years before
electoral reform began, with its well-meant but dispiriting sequel
in the new Poor Law. The defeat of the political and aggressive cause
which had imposed itself upon the revolutionary inspiration of freedom
strengthened the old orthodoxies here. Questioning voices were raised
at their proper peril.

Thomas Henry was the seventh child of George Huxley and Rachel
Withers, his wife. He was born on May 4, 1825, at half-past nine in
the morning, according to the entry in the family Bible, at Ealing,
where his father was senior assistant-master in the well-known school
of Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford. The good doctor, who
had succeeded his father-in-law here in 1791, was enough of a public
character to have his name parodied by Thackeray as Dr. Tickleus.

"I am not aware," writes Huxley playfully in an autobiographical
sketch,

that any portents preceded my arrival in this world; but in
my childhood I remember hearing a trad