strengthened the old orthodoxies here. Questioning voices were raised
at their proper peril.

Thomas Henry was the seventh child of George Huxley and Rachel
Withers, his wife. He was born on May 4, 1825, at half-past nine in
the morning, according to the entry in the family Bible, at Ealing,
where his father was senior assistant-master in the well-known school
of Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford. The good doctor, who
had succeeded his father-in-law here in 1791, was enough of a public
character to have his name parodied by Thackeray as Dr. Tickleus.

"I am not aware," writes Huxley playfully in an autobiographical
sketch,

that any portents preceded my arrival in this world; but in
my childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great
practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in
consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same
reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the
new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way
into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If
that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed
interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence
which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth,
capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and
State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged
to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the
plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no