him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few.
Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and
that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to
do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and
self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he
confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her
boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet
surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere,
clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had
an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.

It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley
did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends
warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.
If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which
his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal
Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was
in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens,
no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which
determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification
in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of
research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge.
He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which
to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own,
so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them.
For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had
fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was
to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by
1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of
"Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such