rk, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by
his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most
ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would
say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the
woman marries a man like Huxley."

* * * * *

There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the
world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular
sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.

John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That
is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a
protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered
and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from
afar and said, Ha! Ha!

There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to
his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the
Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there
been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which
lies in its truth.

It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have
been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same--so why
raise the issue!

Darwin summed up and made nebulae of the truths which Huxley had, up to
that time, held only in gaseous form.

Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was
born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was
published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four
years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the
surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful
voyage on the "Beagle."

These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen
years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently
worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years
before in the South Seas.

"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact
that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending:
that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the
sure and necessary result of certain conditions.

Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years
afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and
everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men