Chapter 2

This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley's life. He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation: History ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, English Grammar, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, with German also and Physiology, besides experimental work in natural science, philosophical analysis, and a copious course of Carlyle.

But this book-work was the least of the influences acting upon him. Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish doctoring, and the boy's experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East End left an ineffaceable mark. It was a grim, living commentary on his Carlyle. For the rest of his life the cause of the poor appealed vividly to him, because he had at least seen something of the way in which the poor lived. People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation would come to him for medical aid. One scene above all was burnt into his memory: a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and holding them out, cried: "That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours' work, and you talk about giving her proper food."

When, after a full year, he left Rotherhithe for the north of London, to be apprenticed--as his elder brother, James, had already been apprenticed--to his other medical brother-in-law, Dr. Scott, he saw more of this teeming, squalid life in the filthy courts and alleys through which he used to pass on his way to the library of the College of Surgeons.

What, in later life, he tried to do to better this state of things was not the usual philanthropic work, but the endeavour to bring intellectual light to the ignorant toilers, to strip away make-believe, and provide some machinery by which to catch and utilize capacity.

Great was the change from the surroundings of Rotherhithe to the home atmosphere of the Scotts. He was now with his favourite sister Eliza, his senior by twelve years, who was a second mother to him. Her sympathy and encouragement did much for him; her belief in the future of "her boy" was redoubled upon his first public success when, at the age of seventeen, he won the second prize, the silver medal of the Apothecaries' Company, in a competitive examination in botany. "For a young hand," he tells us, "I worked really hard from eight or nine in the morning until twelve at night, besides a long, hot summer's walk over to Chelsea, two or three times a week, to hear Lindley. A great part of the time--_i.e._, June and July--I worked till sunrise. The result was a sort of ophthalmia, which kept me from reading at night for months afterwards."

The lively and amusing description of the examination and its sequel is given in full in the _Life_; suffice it to say that when four o'clock came and only two competitors were left writing hard, and not half through the paper, they were allowed to go on by general consent. By eight o'clock the seventeen-year-old came to an end; the older man went on until nine. This was John Ellerton Stocks, afterwards M.D. and a distinguished traveller and botanist in India. To him fell the first prize; the boy, to his own astonishment and the wild delight of his sister, won the second.

In October, 1812, a couple of months after this success, both he and his brother James entered Charing Cross Hospital as free scholars. Here he worked very hard--when it pleased him--took up all sorts of pursuits and dropped them again, and read everything he could lay hands upon, including novels. The one instructor by whom he was really impressed, and for whom he did his utmost, was Wharton Jones, lecturer on physiology. "He was extremely kind and helpful to the youngster, who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to do." Wharton Jones assuredly was one of those born teachers who love to give time and all to a keen and promising pupil. It is good to know that the bread he cast upon the waters returned to him after many days. Wharton Jones, too, was responsible for the publication of the young man's first scientific paper, in the _Medical Gazette_ of 1845. Investigating things for himself, the student of nineteen had found a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair, which received the name of Huxley's layer.

No doubt his work was, as he confesses, not systematically spread over his various subjects; and his energy was fitful, though it was energy that struck his contemporaries, who gave the name of the "Sign of the Head and Microscope" to the familiar silhouette of him as he sat before a window poring over his dissections, while they swarmed out into the quadrangle after lectures.

He achieved brilliant successes as a student. In 1843 he won the first prize in Chemistry, with a note that his "extraordinary diligence and success in the pursuit of this branch of science do him infinite honour," as well as the first prize in Anatomy and Physiology. He was only twenty when, in 1845, he went up for his M.B. at London University, and won a gold medal in his favourite subjects of Anatomy and Physiology, being second in that section.

Early in 1846, being still too young to qualify at the College of Surgeons, yet confronted by the imperative necessity for earning his own bread, he applied, at the suggestion of his fellow-student, Lyon Playfair, for service as a naval surgeon, passed the necessary examination, and went to Haslar. His official chief, old John Richardson, of Arctic fame, silently kept an eye upon him, and, failing to get him one of the coveted resident appointments, kept him, all unaware and ill-content, at Haslar till something worthy of his scientific abilities should turn up. Seven months passed; then came the chance of sailing on the surveying and exploring ship _Rattlesnake_, under Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., brother of the more famous Dean, who was in want of an assistant-surgeon with a turn for science.

IV

THE VOYAGE OF THE _RATTLESNAKE_, AND ITS SEQUEL

The three friends, Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley, were alike in this, that each in his turn began his career with a great voyage of scientific discovery in one of H.M. ships. Darwin was twenty-two when the _Beagle_ sailed for the Straits of Magellan; Hooker, also, was twenty-two when he sailed for the Antarctic with Ross on the _Erebus_; Huxley was but twenty-one when he set forth with Owen Stanley for Australian waters to survey the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea. Each found in the years of distant travel a withdrawal from the distracting bustle of ordinary life, which enabled him to concentrate upon original work and to reflect deeply, unhampered by current doctrines; each came back, not only deeply impressed by the elemental problems of life, but "salted" with the sea and the discipline of the sea.

It was good to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the bottom and I along with it.

Huxley was not so well situated as either Darwin, the well-to-do amateur who was naturalist to the expedition, or Hooker, the son of a distinguished botanist, receiving many privileges from his father's friend, Captain Ross, while officially he was but an assistant-surgeon and second naturalist. Huxley had neither friends nor influence beyond the simple recommendation of "old John" Richardson. Macgillivray, the naturalist, and the Captain himself had scientific interests, but not so the other officers, who disliked seeing the decks messed by the contents of the tow-net. Yet they were "as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are," though they did not understand why he should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which his friends the middies christened "Buffons," after his volume of the _Suites à Buffon_. As assistant-surgeon he messed with the middies, but his good spirits and fun and freedom from any assumption of superiority made the boys his good comrades.

From the first he was very busy, glorying in the prospect of being able to give himself up to his favourite pursuits, without thereby neglecting the proper duties of life. A twenty-eight gun frigate was anything but a floating palace. The _Rattlesnake_ was badly fitted out, and always leaky; the lower deck gave a head-space of four feet ten, which was cramping to a man of five feet eleven; but he had the run of the commodious chart-room, as arranged for a surveying ship, and would have had the run of the library if Captain Stanley's requisition for books had not been "overlooked" by a parsimonious Admiralty. His tiny cabin was light enough to work in on a dull day; but as for the possibility of making a scientific collection, it was but seven feet by six, by five feet six inches high, and infested with cockroaches to boot.

His work took shape in a mass of drawings and descriptions from the dissection of the perishable marine organisms of the tropical seas, and, yet more important, in the new classification he established upon anatomical grounds. His first papers were sent to the Linnean Society by Captain Stanley; the later and more important he sent himself to Edward Forbes, the most interested and helpful of the biologists to whom he had been introduced before he left England. To his angry disappointment, no news of them, no acknowledgment even, reached him on the other side of the world; it was not till he returned, after the four years of his voyage, that he found they had been published by the Royal Society, and had established his reputation as a first-rate investigator. But, though with much difficulty the scientific authorities enabled him to secure the promised Government grant for his book, and a temporary billet ashore while he worked at it, he was only able to publish his _Oceanic Hydrozoa_; a vast quantity of his researches remained unpublished, and subsequent investigators, going over the same ground, won the credit for them.

The other scientific interest strongly aroused on the voyage was anthropology. The cruise of the _Rattlesnake_ provided one of the last opportunities of visiting tribes who had never before seen a white man. The young surgeon made a point of getting into touch with these primitive people at Cape York, and in the islands off New Guinea. He made a preliminary exploration through the uncharted bush of Queensland with the ill-fated Kennedy, and all but accompanied him on his disastrous journey to Cape York, when of all the party only two were rescued, through the devotion of the faithful native guide. He exchanged names, and therefore affinities, with a friendly native of the Louisiades, and learned much at first hand as to their physical and mental characteristics, which stimulated his subsequent anthropological work.

The Australian voyage, then, provided a magnificent field for original research and original thought: the unknown naval surgeon returned from it to find himself recognized as one of the coming men. Contact with the larger world had broadened his outlook; the touch of naval discipline concentrated his powers. But Australia gave him another gift. He met at Sydney his future wife. The young couple fell in love almost at first sight, and became engaged. They were of the same age, 22; they hoped to get married when he was promoted to the rank of full surgeon; they were destined to wait seven-and-a-half years before she returned home to fulfil his early jesting prophecy of making her a Frau Professorin. Here, again, was stern disciplining on the part of destiny. For the first years they were able to meet during the intervals between the long surveying cruises of the ship; they cheated the months of separation by keeping journals for each other. But for nearly five years they were parted by twelve thousand miles of sea, and, worse, by slow sailing ships, when letters would take five months or more to receive an answer, which by that time might be entirely at cross purposes with the changed aspect of affairs. The possibilities of estrangement were incalculable. Their lives were developing on entirely different lines. He had been admitted to the inmost circle of men of science as an intellectual peer; he was elected F.R.S. when he was barely twenty-six, and received the Royal Medal the following year, as well as being chosen to serve on the Council of the Society; he wrote; he lectured at the Royal Institution. And yet, with all the support of the leaders in science, he could not find any post wherein to earn his bread and butter. He stood for professorships at Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King's College, London. The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out. He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their threat to deprive him of his appointment, and the slender pay which was his only certain support. His scientific friends besought him to hold on; something must come in his way, and a brilliant career was before him; but was he justified, he asked himself again and again, in pursuing the glorious phantom, so miserably paid at the best, instead of taking up some business career, perhaps in Australia, and ending the cruel delay which bore so hardly upon the woman he loved? Yet would not this be a desertion of his manifest duty, his intellectual duty to himself and to Science? He knew full well that there was only one course which could bring him either hope or peace, and yet, between the two calls upon him, he never knew which course he would ultimately follow.

For her there was no such mental development. Assuredly she kept up her literary pursuits, her study of German, in which they had found common ground of interest, for she had spent two years at school in Germany; but she was cribbed and cabined by the ups and downs of early colonial life, and the fluctuating ventures upon which her father delighted to embark; there was, naturally, no possibility of her moving in the stimulating intellectual society which was his, and hope deferred wore upon her as the laurels of scientific success were consistently followed by failure in all solid prospects. Yet neither possible misunderstandings, nor actual disappointments, had power to shake the foundations of their mutual trust, and the inspiration of the ideal which each built on the other's so different character; the one more compact of fire, the other more of noble patience, different, but alike in a largeness of soul and freedom from pettiness, which made their forty years of united life something out of the common. She believed in him; in the darkest season of disappointment she bade him remember that a man should pursue those things for which he is most fitted, let them be what they will. Her "noble and self-sacrificing" words brought him comfort, and banished "the spectre of a wasted life that had passed before him--a vision of that servant who hid his talent in a napkin and buried it."

At last the gleams of promise, which had begun to gather, broke through the clouds. On the sudden death of Professor Jamieson, his good friend Edward Forbes was called away in the spring of 1854 to take the Edinburgh professorship. At a few days' notice Huxley was lecturing as Forbes's substitute at the Royal School of Mines. In July he was appointed permanently, with a salary for his course of £100 a year. A few days later his income was doubled. Forbes had held two lectureships; the man who had accepted the other drew back, and it was given to Huxley. In August he was "entrusted with the Coast Survey Investigations under the Geological Survey," becoming the regular Naturalist to the Survey the following year, with pay of £200, afterwards increased to £400, rising to £600. The way was clear; the Heathorn family had already determined to come home. Miss Heathorn had been very ill; she was still far from strong, and, indeed, one gloomy doctor only gave her six months to live. The lover defied him: "I shall marry her all the same;" but the gloomy doctor was alone in his opinion, and, indeed, she lived till she was nearly eighty-nine. The marriage, which was to bring so much active happiness in a life of much struggle and stress, was celebrated on July 1, 1855. They had become engaged at twenty-two; they had waited and striven for eight years; they were rewarded by forty years of mutual love and support.

V

LEHRJAHRE

The award of the Royal Medal was felt by Huxley to be a turning-point. It was something which convinced the "practical" people who used to scoff at his "dreamy" notions, and brought them to urge him on a more "dreamy" course than ever he dreamed of. "However," he remarks, "I take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley all over." Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before him. Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not. The praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his own worthiness. Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more. What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for the eye of his future wife, "an enormous longing after the highest and best in all shapes--a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests." With the sense of power stirring within him, he refused to be beholden to any man. Patronage he abhorred in an ago of patronage. He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a way; but on no other terms. If the time had come to speak out on any matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few. Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere, clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.

It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies. If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens, no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge. He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own, so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them. For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by 1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of "Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction to all biological science. Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.

But the irony of circumstances diverted much of his energy into yet more diverse fields. When Sir Henry de la Beche first offered him the posts of Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History vacated by Professor Forbes, he says:--

I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been palæontological.

Palæontology was his business, and he became a Master in it also, with the result that he forged himself a mighty weapon for use in the struggle over the Origin of Species.

In one of his later Essays he compares the study of human physiology to the Atlantic Ocean:--

Like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that North-West Passage of mere speculation in which so many brave souls have been helplessly frozen up.

Such was the spirit in which, after his long day's work, he added to his labours in physical science a search in another, and to his notion a cognate province of thought and speculation. Many a sleepless night in these years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy--English, German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a quality possessed by few professed philosophers--a large knowledge of the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the laboratory is the forecourt to the temple of philosophy. For the method of the laboratory is but the strict application of the one sound and fruitful mode of reasoning--the method of verification by experiment. Evidence must be tested before being trusted. The first duty of such a method is to question in order to find good reason; Goethe's "tätige Skepsis," a scepticism or questioning which seeks to overcome itself by finding good standing-ground beyond. Authority as such is nothing till verified anew. The creeds of ancient sages, the dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they proceed.