his ambition was realized no one now disputes.

Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain
species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo
at a certain stage.

And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the
individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus:
"The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So
filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and
paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second
mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once
said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a
little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.

It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth:
"Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because
they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid
down. We progress as we comply."

* * * * *

In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous
reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon
another."

The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife
was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she
belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.

It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven
thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both
were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and
reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only
honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in
love with her.

Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant
sloop would answer her--when he got his surgeon's commission she would
marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone
with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob
did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas
Huxley loved but one.

Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not
recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John
Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as
to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.

In that most interesting wo