EDITOR'S NOTE

Of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley,
son of an Ealing schoolmaster, was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His
researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his
pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably
had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And
yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his
father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of
education. "I had," he said, "two years of a pandemonium of a school
(between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any
intellectual direction till I reached manhood." When he was twelve a
craving for reading found satisfaction in Hutton's "Geology," and when
fifteen in Hamilton's "Logic."

At seventeen Huxley entered as a student at Charing Cross Hospital, and
three years later he was M.B. and the possessor of the gold medal for
anatomy and physiology. An appointment as surgeon in the navy proved
to be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career, for he was
gazetted to the "Rattlesnake", commissioned for surveying work in
Torres Straits. He was attracted by the teeming surface life of
tropical seas and his study of it was the commencement of that
revolution in scientific knowledge ultimately brought about by his
researches.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, and died at
Eastbourne June 29, 1895.