of truth. A love of truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, would
necessarily produce a scholarly habit of mind. It was the zealous search
for truth which determined his method of work. In science, Huxley would
"take at second hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching." Some one
reproached him for wasting time verifying what another had already done.
"If that is his practice," he commented, "his work will never live." The
same motive made him a master of languages. To be able to read at first
hand the writings of other nations, he learned German, French, Italian,
and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning to read Greek was to
see for himself if Aristotle really did say that the heart had only
three chambers--an error, he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the
translator. It was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him
impatient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own work has
all the breadth and freedom and universality of the scholar, but it has,
also, a quality equally distinctive of the scholar, namely, an infinite
precision in the matter of detail.

If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, also, a courageous
fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it, was to seek the truth;
his second was to teach it to others, and, if necessary, to contend
valiantly for it. To fail to teach what you honestly know to be true,
because it may harm your reputation, or even because it may give pain to
others, is cowardice. "I am not greatly concerned about any reputation,"
Huxley writes to his wife, "except that of being entirely honest and
straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publication of Man's
Place in Nature would ruin his career, Huxley passed on to others what
nature had revealed to him. He was regardless, also, of the confusion
and pain which his view would necessarily bring to those who had been
nourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or two and to do battle
with the world on the score of its old beliefs, has never been an easy