CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.

[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.
From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years
of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had
been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by
his personal energy and power. When at length settled in the
professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself
more than a beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the
field of knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred
subjects in order to know the true bearings of his own little portion,
that he treated the next six years simply as years of further
apprenticeship. Under the suggestive power of the "Origin of Species"
all these scattered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the
philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his thought
with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in defence of the new
hypothesis first brought him before the public eye as one who not only
had the courage of his convictions when attacked, but could, and more,
would, carry the war effectively into the enemy's country. And for the
next ten years he was commonly identified with the championship of the
most unpopular view of the time; a fighter, an assailant of
long-established fallacies, he was too often considered a mere
iconoclast, a subverter of every other well-rooted institution,
theological, educational, or moral.

It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in
the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies.
His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual