THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

CHAPTER I

FROM SCHOOL TO LIFE-WORK

Birth--Parentage--School-days--Choice of Medical
Profession--Charing Cross Hospital--End of Medical
Studies--Admission to Naval Medical Service.


Some men are born to greatness: even before their arrival in the world
their future is marked out for them. All the advantages that wealth
and the experience of friends can bring attend their growth to
manhood, and their success almost loses its interest because of the
ease with which it is attained. Few of the leaders of science were in
such a position: many of them, such as Priestley, Davy, Faraday, John
Hunter, and Linnæus were of humble parentage, and received the poorest
education: most of them, like Huxley himself, have come from parents
who were able to do little more for their children than set them out
into life along the ordinary educational avenues. In Huxley's boyhood
at least a comfortable income was necessary for this: in every
civilised country nowadays, state endowments, or private endowments,
are ready to help every capable boy, as far as Huxley was helped, and
in his progress from boyhood to supreme distinction, there is nothing
that cannot be emulated by every boy at school to-day. The minds of
human beings when they are born into the world are as naked as their