The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lectures and Essays, by T.H. Huxley

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Title: Lectures and Essays

Author: T.H. Huxley

Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6414]
Posting Date: June 9, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES AND ESSAYS ***

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 O