NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
Many, very many, of us who are now growing grey will recall the days of early manhood when the voice of Huxley was regarded as that of a prophet both in science and philosophy. How the great lights of those days have disappeared! Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Renan, Tennyson, and Huxley have vanished. We can almost remember the exact circumstances of our lives when each passed away, so profound was the impression created. Younger men see fresh constellations and rising stars, but we find the firmament growing darker as these planets fade; the days seem growing shorter, and the nights longer; the ocean to be encroaching on the shore, for the beacons are disappearing.
We possess Huxley's collected writings and lectures; his cold and cheerless marble effigy adorns the vestibule of our great Natural History Museum; but of the man himself little was known to most of his readers. He was too generally appreciated as only a great man of science, or a polemical writer of much power and wisdom. These volumes come as a revelation; we used to read Huxley, and now we know him.
Huxley was entrusted with a great talent, which he did not hide under a bushel; but even then his fight for position was a strenuous one, and he probably made a wise choice in adopting for a motto in his early days the well-known words of Danton: "De l'audace et encore de l'audace et toujours de l'audace." This struggle to many would be an abomination, but to Huxley it was a necessity; he was intellectually a gladiator, and it is probable that the arena developed his immense polemical powers, which rested on a sure and certain knowledge in continuous cultivation. As we read these pages we are in doubt as to which created or supplemented the other. Great as was the original work he did in zoology, we can never forget the philosophical
