THE
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
FEBRUARY, 1901.
| HUXLEY'S LIFE AND WORK.[1] |
By the Right Honorable Lord AVEBURY, D. C. L., LL. D.
I ACCEPTED with pleasure the invitation of your Council to deliver the first Huxley lecture, not only on account of my affection and admiration for him and my long friendship, but it seemed also especially appropriate as I was associated with him in the foundation of this Society. He was President of the Ethnological Society, and when it was fused with the Anthropological we, many of us, felt that Huxley ought to be the first President of the new Institute. No one certainly did so more strongly than your first President, and I only accepted the honor when we found that it was impossible to secure him.
But the foundation of our Institute was only one of the occasions on which we worked together.
Like him, but, of course, far less effectively, from the date of the appearance of the 'Origin of Species' I stood by Darwin and did my best to fight the battle of truth against the torrent of ignorance and abuse which was directed against him. Sir J. Hooker and I stood by Huxley's side and spoke up for Natural Selection in the great Oxford debate of 1860. In the same year we became co-editors of the 'Natural History Review.'
Another small society in which I was closely associated with Huxley for many years was the X Club. The other members were George Busk, secretary of the Linnean Society; Edward Frankland, president of the Chemical Society; T. A. Hirst, head of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich; Sir Joseph Hooker, Herbert Spencer, W. Spottiswoode,
- ↑ The first 'Huxley Memorial Lecture' of the Anthropological Institute, delivered on November 13, 1900.
