Chapter III: Part 3

To the memory of Balfour and of Huxley, my chief teacher in
comparative anatomy, I dedicated my work, “The Age of Mammals.” Huxley
set forth the logic of Darwin as applied to palæontology. Only a few
men of the last century had the gift of speaking in clear language
both to the learned and unlearned, and the greatest of these was
Huxley. To write both for the man of one’s own profession and for the
layman, to be accurate and abreast of the specialist who knows a
subject as well as or better than you do, while intelligible to the
non-specialist—there is the difficulty. Many times have I thought how
simple it would be to address either audience separately. Yet I
consider it fortunate that both are with us, because I share Huxley’s
confidence in addressing those who are willing to do a little serious
thinking in order to enjoy the vast vistas of interesting truth which
come as the reward of effort. I share also his conviction that it is
the duty of the man of science to devote a certain part of his time,
however absorbed in research he may be, to an honest attempt to
scatter scientific truth.

During the winter of 1879–80 I attended Huxley’s full course of
lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Evolution, which were delivered in
the upper floor of the Royal College of Science. In “A Student’s
Reminiscences of Huxley” I especially attempt to describe personal
impressions which he made upon me as a lecturer and as a thinker and
to record some of the flashes of wit with which he enlivened his
lectures. Although intensely occupied at the time with a variety of
public education matters and with the pressure of literary and
scientific work, Huxley found time, chiefly in his home, to enter into
conversation on the subjects flooding his mind. It was there that I
heard some of the best stories here recorded.

A STUDENT’S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY

By far the larger number of American students who go abroad pass through the English Channel, obtain a distant view of the mother country and, after from one to three years in Germany, return with an exclusively German education. Neither England nor France having been visited, the implication is that the countries which produced Owen, Darwin, Huxley and Balfour, or Lamarck, Cuvier, St. Hilaire and Pasteur have nothing to offer the American student. This is not the fact; the fact is that England and France are a half-century behind Germany in that kind of university organization which attracts a foreign student and enables him immediately to find his level and enter upon his research. English and French universities until a very recent date either have been not so fully prepared or have met the newcomer with practically insuperable obstacles in the matter of a degree.

None the less, the student who has not breasted these obstacles for the compensating advantages which the English and French schools offer has made a serious mistake. He has brought back not an Old World education, but an exclusively German education, with its splendidly sound and unique features and with many inherent defects. Germany produces the generals and the rank and file of the armies of science, but certainly the commanders-in-chief, in biology at least, have been Englishmen. If we find the highest exponents of purely inductive research in Germany, we certainly find a better union of the inductive and deductive methods in France and England. France leads in expression and style of thought, although, upon the whole, less sound in substance than Germany. England and France in her best period have given us the most far-reaching and permanent generalizations in biology. It follows that the American student who can afford the experience will profit most by placing himself successively in the scientific atmosphere of Germany, France, and England. My own post-graduate education was unfortunately not of this three-sided type. None the less, it has always seemed a most fortunate circumstance that in the spring of 1879 a letter from the venerable Kitchen Parker led me to Cambridge and to the great privilege of sitting under Balfour, the most brilliant and lovable of men. In the following autumn Huxley’s lectures upon Comparative Zoology began in October, and by entering this course I came to know personally this great master and through him to enjoy the rare opportunity of meeting Charles Darwin. After this experience, which was equally open to any serious student of biology at that time, it is natural that I should strongly advise those of you who are planning your foreign studies to spend part of your time in England and endeavor to discern some of the distinctive qualities of English men of science which Huxley so nobly illustrated. You will pardon the personal element in the following recollections of Huxley as a teacher and the rather informal review of his life-work.

Huxley as a teacher can never be forgotten by any of his students. He entered his lecture-room promptly as the clock was striking nine, rather quickly and with his head bent forward “as if oppressive with its mind.” He usually glanced attention to his class of about ninety and began speaking before he reached his chair. He spoke between his lips, with perfectly clear analysis, with thorough interest, and with philosophic insight which was far above the average of his students. He used very few charts, but handled the chalk with great skill, sketching out the anatomy of an animal as if it were a transparent object. As in Darwin’s face, and as in Erasmus Darwin’s, Buffon’s, and many other anatomists with a strong sense of form, his eyes were heavily overhung by a projecting forehead and eyebrows and seemed at times to look inward. His lips were firm and closely set, with the expression of positiveness, and the other feature which most marked him was the very heavy mass of hair falling over his forehead, which he would frequently stroke or toss back. Occasionally he would lighten up the monotony of anatomical description by a bit of humor. I remember one instance which was probably reminiscent of his famous tilt with Bishop Wilberforce at the meeting of the British Association in 1860. Huxley was describing the mammalian heart and had just distinguished between the tricuspid valve, on the right side of the heart, and the bicuspid valve, on the left, which you know resembles a bishop’s mitre, and hence is known as the mitral valve. He said:

It is not easy to recall on which side these respective valves are
found, but I recommend this rule: you can easily remember that the
mitral is on the left, because a bishop is never known to be on the
right.

Huxley was the father of modern laboratory instruction, but in 1879 he was so intensely engrossed with his own researches that he very seldom came through the laboratory, which was ably directed by T. Jeffrey Parker, assisted by G. B. Howes and W. Newton Parker, all of whom are now professors, Howes having succeeded to Huxley’s chair. Each visit therefore inspired a certain amount of terror, which was really unwarranted, for Huxley always spoke in the kindest tones to his students, although sometimes he could not resist making fun at their expense. There was an Irish student who sat in front of me, whose anatomical drawings in water-color were certainly most remarkable productions. Huxley, in turning over his drawing-book, paused at a large blur under which was carefully inscribed “sheep’s liver” and smilingly said: “I am glad to know that is a liver; it reminds me as much of Cologne Cathedral in a fog as of anything I have ever seen before.” Fortunately the nationality of the student enabled him to fully appreciate the humor.

The greatest event in the winter of 1879 was Darwin’s first and only visit to the laboratory. They came in together, Huxley leading slowly down the long, narrow room, pointing out the especial methods of teaching, which he had originated and which are now universally adopted in England and in this country. Darwin was instantly recognized by the class as he entered and sent a thrill of curiosity down the room, for no one present had ever seen him before. There was the widest possible contrast in the two faces. Darwin’s grayish-white hair and bushy eyebrows overshadowed a pair of deeply set blue eyes, which seemed to image his wonderfully calm and deep vision of nature and at the same time to emit benevolence. Huxley’s piercing black eyes and determined and resolute face were full of admiration and, at the same time, protection of his older friend. He said afterward: “You know, I have to take care of him; in fact, I have always been Darwin’s bulldog,” and this exactly expressed one of the many relations which existed so long between the two men.

Huxley was not always fortunate in the intellectual caliber of the men to whom he lectured in the Royal College of Science. Many of the younger generation were studying in the universities, under Balfour at Cambridge and under Rolleston at Oxford. However, Saville Kent, C. Lloyd Morgan, George B. Howes, T. Jeffrey Parker and W. Newton Parker are representative biologists who were directly trained by Huxley. Many others, not his students, have expressed the deepest indebtedness to him. Among these especially are Professor E. Ray Lankester, of Oxford, and Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge. Huxley once said that he had “discovered Foster.” He not only singled men out, but knew how to direct and inspire them to investigate the most pressing problems of the day. As it was, his thirty-one years of lectures would have produced a far greater effect if they had been delivered from an Oxford, Cambridge or Edinburgh chair. In fact, Huxley’s whole life would have been different, in some ways more effective, in others less so, if the universities had welcomed the young genius who was looking for a post and even cast his eyes toward America in 1850, but in those early days of classical prestige both seats of learning were dead to the science which it was Huxley’s great service in support of Darwin to place beside physics in the lead of all others in England. Moreover, Oxford, if not Cambridge, could not long have sheltered such a wolf in the fold.

Huxley’s public addresses always gave the impression of being largely impromptu, but he once told me: “I always think out carefully every word I am going to say. There is no greater danger than the so-called _inspiration of the moment_, which leads you to say something which is not exactly true or which you would regret afterward. I sometimes envy your countrymen their readiness and believe that a native American, if summoned out of bed at midnight, could step to his window and speak well upon any subject.” I told him I feared he had been slightly misinformed; I feared that many American impromptu speeches were distinguished more by a flow of language than of ideas. But Huxley was sometimes very impressive when he did not speak. In 1879 he was strongly advocating the removal of the Royal School of Mines from crowded Jermyn street to South Kensington, a matter which is still being agitated. At a public dinner given by the alumni of the school, who were naturally attached to the old buildings, the chairman was indiscreet enough to make an attack upon the policy of removal. He was vigorously applauded, when, to every one’s consternation, Huxley, who was sitting at the chairman’s right, slowly rose, paused a moment, and then silently skirted the tables and walked out of the hall. A solemn pall fell over us, which lasted throughout the dinner, and we were all glad to find an excuse to leave early.

In personal conversation Huxley was full of humor and greatly enjoyed stories at his own expense. Such was the following:

In my early period as a lecturer I had very little confidence in my
general powers, but one thing I prided myself upon was clearness. I
was once talking of the brain before a large mixed audience and soon
began to feel that no one in the room understood me. Finally I saw the
thoroughly interested face of a woman auditor and took consolation in
delivering the remainder of the lecture directly to her. At the close,
my feeling as to her interest was confirmed when she came up and asked
if she might put one question upon a single point which she had not
quite understood. “Certainly,” I replied. “Now, Professor,” she said,
“is the cerebellum inside or outside of the skull?”

A story of his about babies is also characteristic:

When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her baby I never fail to
respond, and, while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of an
opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its feet turn in
and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.

Huxley’s life is as full of suggestion to the student as were his lectures and his conversation. It illustrates the force of obtaining a very broad view of the animal kingdom before we attempt to enter the plane of higher generalization. Huxley’s training in embryology, vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, palæontology, and geology was not mapped out for him as for the modern university student. His prolonged sea voyage gave him time and material for reflection, and after this he was led from one subject to another until he obtained a grasp of nature as a whole second only to that of Darwin.

Huxley was born in 1825. Like Goethe, he inherited from his mother his brilliantly alert powers of thought, and from his father his courage and tenacity of purpose, a combination of qualities which especially fitted him for the period in which he was to live. There is nothing striking recorded about his boyhood as a naturalist. He preferred engineering but was led into medicine.

At the close of his medical course he secured a navy medical post upon the _Rattlesnake_. This brought with it, as to Darwin, the training of a four years’ voyage to the South Seas off eastern Australia and west Guinea—a more liberal education to a naturalist than any university affords, even at the present day. This voyage began at twenty-one, and he says of it:

But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunity afforded
for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline, to be
down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities, to
find out how extremely worth living life seemed to be when one woke
from a night’s rest on a soft plank, with the sky for a canopy and
cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast, and more
especially to learn to work for what I got for myself out of it. My
brother officers were as good as sailors ought to be and generally
are, but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my
pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in the pursuit of
the objects which my friends, the middies, christened “Buffons,” after
the title conspicuous on a volume of the “Suites à Buffon,” which
stood in a prominent place on my shelf in the chart room.

As the result of this voyage of four years numerous papers were sent home to the Linnæan Society of London, but few were published; upon his return his first great work, “Upon the Anatomy and Affinities of the Medusæ,” was declined for publication by the Admiralty—a fortunate circumstance, for it led to his quitting the navy for good and trusting to his own resources. Upon publication, this memoir at once established his scientific reputation at the early age of twenty-four, just as Richard Owen had won his spurs by his “Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus.” In 1852 Huxley’s preference as a biologist was to turn back to physiology, which had become the favorite study of his medical course. But his fate was to enter and become distinguished in a widely different branch, which had as little attraction for him as for most students of marine life, namely, palæontology. He says of his sudden change of base:

At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend, Edward Forbes,
to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director-General of the
Geological Survey, offered me the post Forbes had vacated of
Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former
point-blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir
Henry that I did not care for fossils and that I should give up
natural history as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I
held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has
been palæontological.

From this time until 1885 his labors extended over the widest field of biology and of philosophy ever covered by any naturalist, with the single exception of Aristotle. In philosophy Huxley showed rare critical and historical power; he made the most exhaustive study of Hume, but his own philosophical spirit and temper were more directly the offspring of Descartes. Some subjects he mastered, others he merely touched, but every subject which he wrote about he illuminated. Huxley did not discover or first define protoplasm, but he made it known to the English-speaking world as the physical basis of life, recognizing the unity of animal and plant protoplasm. He cleared up certain problems among the Protozoa. In 1849 appeared his great work upon the oceanic Hydrozoa, and familiarity with these forms doubtless suggested the brilliant comparison of the two-layered gastrula to the adult Hydrozoa. He threw light upon the Tunicata, describing the endostyle as a universal feature, but not venturing to raise the Tunicata to a separate order. He set in order the cephalopod mollusca, deriving the spiral from the straight-shelled fossil forms. He contributed to the Arthropoda; his last word upon this group being his charming little volume upon the “Crayfish,” a model of its kind. But think of the virgin field which opened up before him among the vertebrata, when in 1859 he was the first to perceive the truth of Darwin’s theory of descent! Here were Cuvier’s and Owen’s vast researches upon living and extinct forms, a disorderly chaos of facts waiting for generalization. Huxley was the man for the time. He had already secured a thoroughly philosophical basis for his comparative osteology by studying the new embryology of Von Baer, which Richard Owen had wholly ignored. In 1858 his famous Croonian lecture on the “Theory of the Vertebrate Skull” gave the death-blow to Owen’s life-work upon the skull and vertebral archetype and to the whole system of mystical and transcendental anatomy; and now Huxley set to work vigorously to build out of Owen’s scattered tribes the great limbs and branches of the vertebrate tree. He set the fishes and batrachia apart as the _Icthyopsidan_ branch, the reptiles and birds as the _Sauropsidan_ in contrast with the _Mammalian_, which he derived from a prosauropsidan or amphibian stem, a theory which with some modification has received strong recent verification.

Professor Owen, who had held undisputed sway in England up to 1858, fought nobly for opinions which had been idolized in the first half-century, but was routed at every point. Huxley captured his last fortress when, in his famous essay of 1865, “Man’s Place in Nature,” he undermined Owen’s teaching of the separate and distinct anatomical position of man. We can only appreciate Huxley’s fighting qualities when we see how strongly Owen was intrenched at the beginning of this long battle royal; he was director of the British Museum and occupied other high posts; he had the strong moral support of the government and of the royal family, although these were weak allies in a scientific encounter.

Huxley’s powers of rapid generalization, of course, betrayed him frequently; his Bathybius was a groundless and short-lived hypothesis; he went far astray in the phylogeny of the horses. But these and other errors were far less attributable to defects in his reasoning powers than to the extraordinarily high pressure under which he worked for the twenty years between 1860 and 1880, when duties upon the Educational Board, upon the Government Fisheries Commission, and upon Parliamentary committees crowded upon him. He had at his command none of the resources of modern technique. He cut his own sections. I remember once seeing some of his microscopic sections. To one of our college junior students working with a Minot microtome Huxley’s sections would have appeared like translucent beefsteaks—another illustration that it is not always the section which reveals the natural law, but the man who looks at the section.

Huxley was a master not only in the search for truth but in the way in which he presented it, both in writing and in speaking. And we are assured, largely as he was gifted by nature, his beautifully lucid and interesting style was partly the result of deliberate hard work. He was not born to it; some of his early essays are rather labored; he acquired it. He was familiar with the best Greek literature and restudied the language; he pored over Milton and Carlyle and Mill; he studied the fine old English of the Bible; he took as especial models Hume and Hobbes, until finally he wrote his mother tongue as no other Englishman wrote it. Take up any one of his essays, biological, literary, philosophical, you at once see his central idea and his main purpose, although he never uses italics or spaced letters, as many of our German masters do to relieve the obscurity of their sentences. We are carried along upon the broad current of his reasoning without being confused by his abundant side illustrations. He gleaned from the literature of all time until his mind was stocked with apt similes. Who but Huxley would have selected the title “Lay Sermons” for his first volume of addresses; or, in 1880, twenty-one years after Darwin’s work appeared, would have entitled his essay upon the influence of this work “The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species”? Or to whom else would it have occurred to repeat over the grave of Balfour the exquisitely appropriate lines: “For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime”? Who else could have inveighed thus against modern specialization:

We are in the case of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of the Roman
citadel to the Sabines and was crushed by the weight of the reward
bestowed upon her. It has become impossible for any man to keep pace
with the progress of the whole of any important branch of science. It
looks as if the scientific, like other revolutions, meant to devour
its own children; as if the growth of science tended to overwhelm its
votaries; as if the man of science of the future were condemned to
diminish into a narrow specialist as time goes on. It appears to me
that the only defense against this tendency to the degeneration of
scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of
scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of culture
without superficiality; and, on the other hand, depth and precision of
knowledge without narrowness.

What Haeckel did for evolution in Germany, Huxley did in England. As the earliest and most ardent supporter of Darwin and the theory of descent, it is remarkable that he never gave an unreserved support to the theory of natural selection as all-sufficient. Twenty-five years ago, with his usual penetration and prophetic insight, he showed that the problem of variation might, after all, be the greater problem; and only three years ago, in his Romanes Lecture, he disappointed many of the disciples of Darwin by declaring that natural selection failed to explain the origin of our moral and ethical nature. Whether he was right or wrong we will not stop to discuss, but consider the still more remarkable conditions of Huxley’s relations to the theory of evolution. As expositor, teacher, defender, he was the high priest of evolution. From the first he saw the strong and weak points of the special Darwinian theory; he wrote upon the subject for thirty years, and yet he never contributed a single original or novel idea to it; in other words, Huxley added vastly to the demonstration, but never added to the sum of either theory or working hypothesis, and the contemporary history of the theory proper could be written without mentioning his name. This lack of speculation upon the factors of evolution was true throughout his whole life; in the voyage of the _Rattlesnake_, he says, he did not even think of the species problem. His last utterance regarding the causes of evolution appeared in one of the reviews as a passing criticism of Weismann’s finished philosophy, in which he implies that his own philosophy of the causes of evolution was as far off as ever; in other words, Huxley never fully made up his mind or committed himself to any causal theory of development.

Taking the nineteenth century at large, outside of our own circles of biology Huxley’s greatest and most permanent achievement was his victory for free thought. Personally we may not be agnostic; we may disagree with much that he has said and written, but we must admire Huxley’s valiant services none the less. A reformer must be an extremist, and Huxley was often extreme, but he never said what he did not believe to be true. If it is easy for you and for me to say what we think, in print and out of print now, it is because of the battles fought by such men as Huxley and Haeckel. When Huxley began his great crusade the air was full of religious intolerance, and, what is quite as bad, scientific shams. If Huxley had entered the contest carefully and guardedly, he would have been lost in the enemies’ ranks, but he struck right and left with sledge-hammer blows, whether it was a high dignitary of the church or of the state. Just before the occasion of one of his greatest contests, that with Gladstone in the pages of _The Contemporary Review_, Huxley was in Switzerland, completely broken down in health and suffering from torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had written one of his characteristically brilliant articles upon the close correspondence between the Order of Creation as revealed in the first chapter of Genesis and the Order of Evolution as shown by modern biology. “When this article reached me,” Huxley told me, “I read it through and it made me so angry that I believe it must have acted upon my liver. At all events, when I finished my reply to Gladstone I felt better than I had for months past.”

Huxley’s last public appearance was at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1894. He had been very urgently invited to attend, for, about a third of a century before, the association had met at Oxford and Huxley had had his famous encounter with Bishop Wilberforce. It was felt that the anniversary would be a historic one and incomplete without his presence, and so it proved to be. Huxley’s especial duty was to second the vote of thanks for the Marquis of Salisbury’s address, one of the invariable formalities of the opening meeting of the association. The meeting proved to be the greatest one in the history of the association. The Sheldonian Theatre was packed with one of the most distinguished scientific audiences ever brought together, and the address of the Marquis was worthy of the occasion. The whole tenor of it was the unknown in science. Passing from the unsolved problems of astronomy, chemistry and physics, he came to biology. With delicate irony he spoke of the “_comforting word, evolution_,” and passing to the Weismannian controversy implied that the diametrically opposed views so frequently expressed nowadays threw the whole process of evolution into doubt. It was only too evident that the Marquis himself found no comfort in evolution and even entertained a suspicion as to its probability. It was well worth the whole journey to Oxford to watch Huxley during this portion of the address. In his red doctor-of-laws gown, placed upon his shoulders by the very body of men who had once referred to him as “a Mr. Huxley,” he sank deeper into his chair upon the very front of the platform and restlessly tapped his foot. His situation was an unenviable one. He had to thank an ex-Prime Minister of England and present Chancellor of Oxford University for an address the sentiments of which were directly against those he himself had been maintaining for twenty-five years. He said afterward that when the proofs of the Marquis’s address were put in his hands the day before, he realized that he had before him a most delicate and difficult task.

Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thompson), one of the most distinguished living physicists, first moved the vote of thanks, but his reception was nothing to the tremendous applause which greeted Huxley in the heart of that university whose traditional principles he had so long been opposing. Considerable anxiety had been felt by his friends lest his voice would fail to fill the theatre, for it had signally failed during the Romanes Lecture delivered in Oxford the year before, but when Huxley arose he reminded one of a venerable gladiator returning to the arena after years of absence. He raised his figure and his voice to full height, and, with one foot turned over the edge of the step, veiled an unmistakable and vigorous protest in the most gracious and dignified speech of thanks.

Throughout the subsequent special sessions of this meeting Huxley could not appear. He gave the impression of being aged, if not infirm, but no one realized that he had spoken his last word as champion of the law of evolution. He soon returned to Eastbourne. Early in the winter he contracted the grippe, which passed into pneumonia. He rallied once or twice, and his last effort to complete a reply to Balfour’s “Foundations of Belief” hastened his death, which came upon June 29, 1895, at the age of seventy.

I have endeavored to show in how many ways Huxley was a model for us of the younger generation. In the central hall of the British Museum of Natural History sits in marble the life-size figure of Charles Darwin; upon his right will soon be placed a beautiful statue of Richard Owen, and I know that there are many who will enjoy taking some share in the movement to complete this group with the noble figure of Thomas Henry Huxley.

_The above Memorial was delivered before the New York Academy of
Sciences November 11, 1895. It was then revised and delivered as “A
Student’s Reminiscences of Huxley” to the assembly of students at the
Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. As printed
in this form it was sent to Leonard Huxley, who wrote the following
letter of acknowledgment_:

CHARTERHOUSE
GODALMING
12 July 1897

DEAR PROFESSOR OSBORN:

I have still to thank you, & that most warmly, for your admirable
“Lecture at Wood’s Hole.” It is not merely a pleasant reminder of my
meeting with you seven years ago, but one of the very best memorial
sketches of my father which have yet appeared, & so written as somehow
to succeed in touching one’s personal feelings beyond the ordinary.
Indeed if I had written to you immediately after my first reading of
it, what I wrote might have appeared a trifle exaggerated. So you will
forgive my apparent remissness in not acknowledging the receipt of it
before. I do hope you will allow me to quote from your lecture, in the
Life I am working upon—a long task, of which I am now somewhere about
the middle.

Will you also be kind enough to tell me to what precisely you refer
when you speak of my father’s forming a wrong generalisation about the
phylogeny of the horse? His views before or after his American visit
of 1876? I do not know enough of the subject first-hand.

Once more, let me thank you for your dear & sympathetic piece of work
& believe me

Sincerely yours,
(Signed) LEONARD HUXLEY.

FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR
]

FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR
1851–1882

To Huxley and to Balfour, younger brother of Arthur Balfour, my first
and most inspiring teacher in comparative embryology, I dedicated my
work, “The Age of Mammals.” Balfour’s genius was beyond imitation, but
his pupils may follow the example of his ardent enthusiasm and his
genial way of living the life of science.

FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR

About a year ago came the sad news of the sudden death of Professor Balfour, of Cambridge. If the loss was felt less severely in this country than in England it was only because he had fewer personal friends here, and to fully understand his worth one must have known and talked with him. It is true that it required no unusual insight to read the fine qualities of the man in his writings, but none save those who knew him could appreciate his remarkable personal attractiveness. Not the least part of the wonderful work of his short life was that which he accomplished as a teacher; here, as everywhere, his personal influence had a large share, and a sketch of Balfour’s scientific work would be incomplete without a recognition of the bearing which his noble character had upon it.

The meeting of leading biologists to found the memorial studentship was remarkable in many ways; rarely have been heard such words of admiration and love for one man as were then expressed for Balfour. Many spoke at length of the debt Cambridge owed him. It may be said that he divided with Foster the honor of giving the great impetus to the biological movement in the English universities. What Huxley had done for Foster the latter did for Balfour, giving him the first hearty encouragement and support; together they raised biology from the third to the level of the first rank of studies at Cambridge, equalling that held by mathematics. Oxford soon followed this important movement, trying to secure Balfour for the professorship left vacant by the death of Rolleston. His connection with natural science at Cambridge was described in warm language by Foster, his teacher, and by Sedgwick, one of his pupils; he advanced morphology there by his brilliant success in teaching and in research.

In teaching he combined manly force with a delicate regard for the feelings of his pupils. From the writer’s personal impressions of him as a lecturer, he did not aim at eloquence, but to be understood in every step. Rarely looking at his hearers, he spoke rapidly and with intense earnestness, crowding a vast deal into the hour. The main qualities of his character shone forth in his lectures: energy, which he infused into his hearers; truthfulness, which soon gave implicit confidence in his statements; modesty and sympathy, which inspired effort and free exchange of thought.

Balfour’s love of truth came constantly into play in his laboratory instruction. While looking over a student’s shoulder he would sometimes say with a laugh: “You must interpret that specimen with the eye of faith”; but this was very far from being a serious injunction, for he exacted of his students the greatest caution in the progress of their microscopic work. However tempting a certain interpretation of a specimen might be, Balfour never accepted it until it rested on the clearest evidence. An instance of this sort is recalled which related to the much disputed origin of a well-known embryonic structure. A number of sections had been prepared, seeming to confirm the view which Balfour himself had advocated some time before; it required considerable self-control not to attach a somewhat forced meaning to them. This was, however, forbidden, and it was not until several days afterward that fresh sections established the fact beyond question.

To Foster, Balfour repaid his student-debt by extending, in turn, continued encouragement to others. He did not fear, as many great teachers have, that joint labor with his juniors would derogate from his reputation. His joint articles are numerous; he was zealous to recognize research done by his pupils, seeming to be prouder of this than of his own work. Nothing could be more stimulating to the young men about him, still distrustful of their powers, than this generous co-operation. Is it surprising, then, that the voluntary attendance upon his lectures increased in seven years from ten to ninety and that at the time of his death twenty students were engaged in difficult research in his laboratory? Only those who are familiar by experience with the few incentives among younger students to the study of biology can appreciate what these numbers mean.

We need not attempt to give a full list of Balfour’s writings. They began in 1873, his twenty-second year, with a few short papers appearing over Foster’s name and his own in _The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_; they terminated nine years later with his fine work upon Peripatus, published posthumously in the same journal. His extensive intermediate works, “The Elasmobranch Fishes” and “Comparative Embryology,” are universally known.

From the first he devoted himself to embryology. While this, as among the youngest of the biological sciences, admits of rapid work, it is far from admitting rapid generalization. No other branch of morphology requires more painstaking; the very materials one has to study are minute and indefinite, and two minds will often place different constructions upon the same specimen. There is abundant opportunity for scientific guesswork, with the feeling of security that disproval will be difficult. Balfour understood the real value of guessing at truth, but he always made it very clear to the reader when he was so doing; his hypotheses were accompanied by definite statements in which the reasons pro and con were set forth in all impartiality to each. Herein lies the chief charm and merit of his work, its brilliant suggestiveness, side by side but never in confusion with well-established facts. Every chapter contains half a dozen invitations to other investigators to prove or disprove certain provisional statements. Vast as is the information contained in his “Comparative Embryology,” Balfour himself appreciated that, as far as mere facts went, the first volume would be somewhat out of date before the second was in press. Not so, however, with his masterly discussions of these facts, which are found on every page and the value of which, to embryologists, cannot be estimated. Moreover, to his authorship is largely due the rapidly spreading interest in embryology in England and America—a branch of science, it will be remembered, which had previously been mostly in German hands.

One frequently heard from him his own very modest opinion of his work; this was not at all inconsistent with striking independence and originality of thought and adherence to his convictions. His modesty added more to the recognition of his genius than any assertions of his own could have done. Many were pressing forward to assert his claims, and honors were showered upon him in England and abroad. He was admired and beloved by all who knew him. In scientific discussion he had the rare quality, which Richard Cobden is said to have possessed, of remaining on the pleasantest personal terms with his opponents.

His energy in all matters was great and his power of writing was unusually rapid; but, advised by kind friends, he rarely overtaxed his strength, which was limited. He spent most of his evenings with his friends, throwing off from his mind the labors of the day and talking vivaciously upon the topics of the time. When the first volume of his “Comparative Embryology” was being written, he generally worked but five hours daily, giving much time to physical exercise, bicycling or tennis, into which he entered with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He was courageous but not reckless, and nothing in his previous life would lead us to suppose that the mountain climb which proved fatal was undertaken in a foolhardy spirit.

Balfour in a few years accomplished the work of a lifetime. His influence was and is twofold: first, upon those with whom he came into personal contact, especially his scientific associates and students, an influence which cannot fail to endure (well expressed by Professor Kitchen Parker: “I feel that his presence is still with me; I cannot lose the sense of his presence”); secondly, the influence of his scientific work, which for genius, breadth, and truth can never be surpassed. May the splendid memorial which has been raised for him perpetuate his noble example as a teacher and man of science.

_From a photograph by Brown Brothers_

JAMES BRYCE
]

JAMES BRYCE
1838–1922

I had the privilege of knowing James Bryce for many years and enjoyed
many long and delightful conversations with him. Beyond all other
great men I have known he impressed me as most eager for broad and
deep knowledge both of men and of nature. He gained more by travel and
direct observation than by reading the works of others.

Although an address was carefully thought out, the following was
entirely extemporaneous, because I was suddenly called upon to deliver
it in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—quite a
contrast to the customary platform of the college and university
lecturer! I felt compelled by the surrounding religious atmosphere to
use a text, which was happily afforded by the choir as it sang
Newman’s beautiful hymn as a processional.

JAMES BRYCE

I am not permitted to have a text, because I am not a preacher. As a naturalist, I am speaking here by invitation of the Bishop and the Dean of this Cathedral on the life of James Bryce as a student of man and of nature. I find in the opening of the beautiful hymn sung by the choir on entering this Cathedral the words which I cannot resist paraphrasing as the central thought of what I am about to say: Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling confusion.

“Lead, Kindly Light,” was the inner motive of the life of James Bryce—the kindly light of the genial nature of a man of faith and confidence, of a man of rugged resolution and constant determination, who never faltered in his efforts, whether it was a physical, or social, or intellectual, or political problem, to throw upon it the light of most careful and thorough examination.

Then another line of the same beautiful poem of John Henry Newman,

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,

reveals the other aspect of the life of James Bryce which will impress you if you will read his four volumes as a traveler and explorer. When confused by the world and by the strife of political parties, Bryce would go off quietly on one of these great journeys of his, borne by his stout Scotch heart and by his indomitable energy as a mountain-climber. Brought up in a climate which brings out the best qualities in a man—that hardy nursery of strong Britons; born in northern Ireland, where the kindly qualities and genial nature of the Irish blend with the sturdy persistence of the Scotch, he was equipped by birth as well as by the early training of a remarkable father to enter life along many paths which opened out before him.

Follow him, no doubt somewhat confused, at the age of thirty-nine, after a period of political service in Parliament and lectureship in Oxford University, on that remarkable journey through and beyond the countries which he studied in his “Holy Roman Empire,” into and through Asia Minor, into the region on the borderland of Armenia, in search of Mount Ararat, and you observe an event in his life most typical and characteristic. Every one told him it was impossible to ascend Mount Ararat. One after another the parties that started with him fell behind, until, finally, about four or five thousand feet from the summit, he was entirely alone, and from that point he pushed on to the hollow between the twin peaks where the Bible myth tells us the Ark of Noah rested. He did not find any traces of the Ark, but he seems to have found, in that ascent and in the wonderful survey which the ascent gave him of the great tides of human history which have ebbed and flowed around the base of that mountain, a new and fresh perspective for all his future historical works. There, also, at the turning-point in life, when according to some men the critical age of forty is reached, James Bryce reversed the natural order of things, and until the age of eighty-three—during the latter part of which period I had the honor of making his acquaintance—became a younger man, a larger man, a greater man every year to all those who had the pleasure and privilege and inspiration of knowing him.

What a contrast his thoroughness with the superficiality of other men who have treated the same broad periods of human history, of human activity, and to whom many people appeal for light and guidance! Wells, writing his “Outline of History” from his armchair, guided by the work of all the authors upon whom he could lay his hand; Bryce, seeking out the fountains, the origins, the beginnings of these wonderful movements of peoples which are summed up in the words “Human History.” Himself retreading the paths worn by men for centuries, observing that wonderful variety of races of men where, in entering Transcaucasia, he came on the borders between Turkey and the Russian Dominions; again, when in South Africa, he touched the life of the Kaffirs, of the Hottentots, and of that race of Bushmen which stands at the very bottom of the human scale; finally, in South America, at the age of seventy-four, he entered the intimate life of a people he had not touched before, of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the native Indians of the South American Continent—always traveling with the same genial attitude, the same kindliness, the same lack of criticism, which distinguished his life and writings throughout.

Small wonder that, having as a boy and young man been brought up among the British people, among the Scotch, the Irish, the English, the Scotch-Irish, who are the fountains of our own American life, when he came to America he understood the Americans and was welcomed as one of us, as a man who could interpret our life, our institutions, who could tell us the truth about ourselves without our being offended, the most difficult message that any one coming from any other part of the world can give to the American!

Now we find that Bryce is not dead! James Bryce is not dead! James Bryce is living! He will live! Out of his inspiration, from those penetrating eyes, from that wonderful intellect, from those profound and unbiassed and unprejudiced studies, out of the fruits of years of personal experience, he finally surveys our American institutions in the last, and one of the greatest, of his works, “Modern Democracies.” Nothing could attest the truthfulness of his nature more clearly than the fact that the note of that volume is so different from the note of his early, confident writings as a young ardent Liberal, almost Radical. He found in our midst, and in the new democracies everywhere, so many confusing thoughts, so many unexpected counter-currents, that he comes out, as does every great and profound student of human life and human affairs who approaches the matter from the scientific standpoint of profound knowledge, with a clear warning of the dangers which surround us if we do not take heed and if we lose the art of choosing our leaders, our spiritual leaders, our intellectual leaders, our political leaders.

Leadership! Leadership is the last note, to my mind, of Bryce’s life. He is leading. He himself will lead because he has become now, and I believe for all time, the Kindly Light which will guide us through the interpretation of our American institutions.

_From a painting by A. Edelfelt_

LOUIS PASTEUR
]

LOUIS PASTEUR
1822–1895

To my mind Louis Pasteur is the greatest benefactor of mankind since
the time of Jesus Christ, and as he was inspired by religious
sentiment I claim that he should be enrolled among the saints and
enshrined in our cathedrals. It is of this aspect of his life that
“The New Order of Sainthood” deals. Contemplation of this aspect of
his life led me to reflections upon Nature and Religion, in which I
was greatly aided by my previous studies in the natural philosophy of
the Greeks and of Augustine and was guided to the wonderful passages
of Dante in “The Divine Comedy” by Bishop Boyd-Carpenter. The sequel
to this address is to be found in “Evolution and Religion,” my reply
to William Jennings Bryan.

THE NEW ORDER OF SAINTHOOD

Among all the great scientific men whom the nineteenth century produced Pasteur ranks supreme as a benefactor of mankind. He played the original and creative part in the movement for the prevention and relief of human suffering which Sir William Osler has aptly termed “Man’s Redemption of Man.” It is far under the truth to say that he has saved more lives than Napoleon destroyed. In nature he found the causes of a very large part of human suffering; in nature he also found the means of controlling or averting suffering. His attitude toward his fellow men was one of noble compassion. His first trial of the hydrophobia serum with a young sufferer brought to him, his agony of mind lest the remedy itself might be the means of causing death, his joy as the child was restored in perfect health to its parents, is one of the most beautiful episodes in human history. As recited by Radot, “Pasteur was going through a succession of hopes, fears, anguish, and an ardent yearning to snatch little Meister from death; he could no longer work. At night feverish visions came to him of this child, whom he had seen playing in the garden, suffocating in the mad struggles of hydrophobia, like the dying child he had seen at the Hôpital Trousseau in 1880. Vainly his experimental genius assured him that the virus of that most terrible of diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was about to be delivered from this dread horror—his human tenderness was stronger than all, his accustomed ready sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties of others was for the nonce centred in ‘the dear lad.’...

“Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gayly running about as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue eyes now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last inoculation; in the evening, after claiming a kiss from ‘Dear Monsieur Pasteur,’ as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully.”[4]

The life of Pasteur is typical of that of many students of nature, of less genius, perhaps, but of equal devotion and self-sacrifice. It is interesting to imagine what tributes might have been rendered to Pasteur if he had lived in the period of the early saints of the Church and had won the love of his generation and the reverence of succeeding generations by his mighty works. It is interesting to surmise what would have been the attitude of the early Church toward such a benefactor of mankind. Our belief today is that Pasteur should stand as a symbol of the profound and intimate relation which must develop between the study of nature and the religious life of man, between our present and future knowledge of nature and the development of our religious conceptions and beliefs.

In a very beautiful address[5] before the students of the University of Edinburgh Sir William Osler opens with the words: “To man there has been published a triple gospel—of his soul, of his goods, of his body.” What is and what shall be the attitude of the Church toward the gospel of the body, toward the men who have given us this gospel? The question turns our thoughts at once to the leading and greatest exponent of this gospel, and backward to the early centuries of the Church before there had arisen any divorce between the study of nature and the matters of the spirit.

We are now in a process of readjustment between the issues of two lines of thought, which are almost as old as human history; between laws derived from nature which were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century as to the origin of man, and traditional laws which when traced to their very beginnings we find to have been purely of human conception. Let us imagine our descendants three or four hundred years hence looking back on the spiritual and intellectual history of man; with larger perspective, they will separate these two grand thought-movements:

First, the Oriental movement, marked by Oriental lack of curiosity about natural law, a great moral and spiritual movement developing three thousand years before Christ along the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates, out of five thousand years of hard human experience, and expressed in Judea in the faith that nature is the continuous handiwork of God, in a supreme standard of righteousness, the moral duty being finally summed up in the single phrase, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This was the spiritual redemption of man, which left the laws of his physical welfare unknown and uncared for.