Lectures and Essays

Part 1

Produced by Sue Asscher

LECTURES AND ESSAYS

By T.H. Huxley

The People's Library

Cassell And Company, Ltd.

London, Paris, New York, Toronto & Melbourne.

MCMVIII.

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 Eastbourne June 29, 1895.

CONTENTS.

ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE:

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.

THE PAST CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.

THE METHOD BY WHICH THE CAUSES OF THE PRESENT AND PAST CONDITIONS OF ORGANIC NATURE ARE TO BE DISCOVERED.--THE ORIGINATION OF LIVING BEINGS.

THE PERPETUATION OF LIVING BEINGS, HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION AND VARIATION.

THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE AS AFFECTING THE PERPETUATION OF LIVING BEINGS.

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE POSITION OF MR. DARWIN'S WORK, "ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES," IN RELATION TO THE COMPLETE THEORY OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE.

ESSAYS ON DARWIN'S "ORIGIN OF SPECIES":

THE DARWINIAN HYPOTHESIS.

TIME AND LIFE.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

CRITICISMS ON "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES".

EVIDENCE AS TO MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE:

ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAN-LIKE APES.

ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN TO THE LOWER ANIMALS.

ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN.

Part 2

ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE.

ON THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY.

GEOLOGICAL CONTEMPORANEITY AND PERSISTENT TYPES OF LIFE.

CORAL AND CORAL REEFS.

YEAST.

THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD.

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NOTICE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The Publisher of these interesting Lectures, having made an arrangement for their publication with Mr. J.A. Mays, the Reporter, begs to append the following note from Professor Huxley:--

"Mr. J. Aldous Mays, who is taking shorthand notes of my 'Lectures to Working Men,' has asked me to allow him, on his own account, to print those Notes for the use of my audience. I willingly accede to this request, on the understanding that a notice is prefixed to the effect that I have no leisure to revise the Lectures, or to make alterations in them, beyond the correction of any important error in a matter of fact."

*****

ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE:

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.

When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six lectures* ([Footnote] *To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863.) which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you, it occurred to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a true light, or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call, that which I conceive myself to be the true light, the position of a book which has been more praised and more abused, perhaps, than any book which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species". That work, I doubt not, many of you have read; for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife among you. At any rate, all of you will have heard of it,--some by one kind of report and some by another kind of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of all have been probably more or less excited on the subject of that work. All I can do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put before you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man, who, of course, is liable to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one whose business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this nature.

And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number of lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to preliminary matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of those principles which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or less directly before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of you are naturalists; and even if you were, the misconceptions and misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists on these matters would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to take,--that I should start from the beginning,--that I should endeavour to point out what is the existing state of the organic world,--that I should point out its past condition,--that I should state what is the precise nature of the undertaking which Mr. Darwin has taken in hand; that I should endeavour to show you what are the only methods by which that undertaking can be brought to an issue, and to point out to you how far the author of the work in question has satisfied those conditions, how far he has not satisfied them, how far they are satisfiable by man, and how far they are not satisfiable by man.

To-night, in taking up the first part of this question, I shall endeavour to put before you a sort of broad notion of our knowledge of the condition of the living world. There are many ways of doing this. I might deal with it pictorially and graphically. Following the example of Humboldt in his "Aspects of Nature", I might endeavour to point out the infinite variety of organic life in every mode of its existence, with reference to the variations of climate and the like; and such an attempt would be fraught with interest to us all; but considering the subject before us, such a course would not be that best calculated to assist us. In an argument of this kind we must go further and dig deeper into the matter; we must endeavour to look into the foundations of living Nature, if I may so say, and discover the principles involved in some of her most secret operations. I propose, therefore, in the first place, to take some ordinary animal with which you are all familiar, and, by easily comprehensible and obvious examples drawn from it, to show what are the kind of problems which living beings in general lay before us; and I shall then show you that the same problems are laid open to us by all kinds of living beings. But first, let me say in what sense I have used the words "organic nature." In speaking of the causes which lead to our present knowledge of organic nature, I have used it almost as an equivalent of the word "living," and for this reason,--that in almost all living beings you can distinguish several distinct portions set apart to do particular things and work in a particular way. These are termed "organs," and the whole together is called "organic." And as it is universally characteristic of them, this term "organic" has been very conveniently employed to denote the whole of living nature,--the whole of the plant world, and the whole of the animal world.

Few animals can be more familiar to you than that whose skeleton is shown on our diagram. You need not bother yourselves with this "Equus caballus" written under it; that is only the Latin name of it, and does not make it any better. It simply means the common Horse. Suppose we wish to understand all about the Horse. Our first object must be to study the structure of the animal. The whole of his body is inclosed within a hide, a skin covered with hair; and if that hide or skin be taken off, we find a great mass of flesh, or what is technically called muscle, being the substance which by its power of contraction enables the animal to move. These muscles move the hard parts one upon the other, and so give that strength and power of motion which renders the Horse so useful to us in the performance of those services in which we employ him.

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