the "Rattlesnake," and above him
was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises
on this and also on that.

Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the
seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His
genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who
got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man,
she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons,"
her son used to say.

College education was not for that goodly brood--a living was the first
thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was
apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum
that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.

Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great
thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial,
difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger
and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His
thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose
prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and
took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free
Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant
surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and
the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to
the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.

Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday.
Tomorrow will be the result of today.

The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He
realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had
studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a
single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.

Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly
recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he
thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.

To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that
there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect
them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work
on barnacles.

Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to
England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man.
That