History at Edinburgh, succeeded his distinguished friend as Professor of Natural History in that institution, a post which he has continued to hold up to the present day. Since that time Mr. Huxley has lived in London a life of continued and brilliant labor. From 1863 to 1869 he held the post of Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was twice chosen Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In 1869 and 1870 he was President of the Geological Society, having previously served as secretary. During the same period he was President of the Ethnological Society. In 1870 he filled the office of President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1872 was elected secretary to the Royal Society. He has been elected a corresponding member of the Academies of Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg, and of other foreign scientific societies, has received honorary degrees from the Universities of Breslau and Edinburgh, and last year was presented with the Order of the Northern Star by the King of Sweden. Since 1870 he has been one of the members of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science. From 1870 to 1872 he served on the London School Board as one of the members for Marylebone, and during that time was chairman of the Education Committee which arranged the scheme of education adopted in the Board Schools. In 1872 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen.
In this skeleton narrative of the career of this distinguished naturalist we have purposely omitted any list or any critical estimate of his writings; but we have great pleasure in laying before our readers, as a token of what is thought of him by those who are laboring in the same field of science, the following communication from one who ranks, in his own country as well as among ourselves, as one of the very first of German naturalists.
The more general, year by year, the interest taken by all educated people in the progress of natural science, and the wider, day by day, the field of science, the more difficult is it for the man of science himself to keep pace with all the advances made—the smaller becomes the number of those who are able to take a bird's-eye view of the whole field of science, and in whose minds the higher interest of the philosophical importance of the whole is not lost amid a crowd of fascinating particulars. Indeed, if at the present moment we run over the names distinguished in the several sciences into which Natural Knowledge may be divided—in Physics, in Chemistry, in Botany, in Zoology—we find but few investigators who can be said to have thoroughly mastered the whole range of any one of them. Among these few we must place Thomas Henry Huxley, the distinguished British investigator, who at the present time justly ranks as the first zoologist
