itional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great
practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in
consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same
reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the
new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way
into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If
that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed
interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence
which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth,
capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and
State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged
to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the
plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no
habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

The fact that he received the name of the doubting apostle was by no
means one of those superhuman coincidences in which some naive people
see portents. In later years my father used to make humorous play
with its appropriateness, but in plain fact he was named after his
grandfather, Thomas Huxley. I have not traced the origin of the Henry.

Both parents were of dark complexion, and all the children were
dark-haired and dark-eyed. The father was tall, and, I believe, well
set-up: a miniature shows him with abundant, brown, curling hair
brushed high above a good forehead, giving the effect, so fashionable
in 1830, of a high-peaked head. The features are well cut and regular;
the nose rather long and inclined to be aquiline; the cheeks well
covered; the eyes, under somewhat arched brows, expressive and
interesting. Outwardly, there is a certain resemblance traceable
between the miniature and a daguerrotype of Huxley at nineteen;
but the debt, physical and mental, owed to either parent is thus
recorded:--

Physically, I am the son of my mother so completely--even
down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their
appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed
them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself,
except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately
in my case, has never been cultivated; a hot temper, and
that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observer