Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/795

Rh clear light immediately around him; and, on the other hand, that power of foreseeing future consequences of immediate action which forms the greater part of what we call sagacity. The former gave him his notable dialectic skill, and mark all his contributions to scientific literature; the latter made him, in addition, an able administrator and a wise counselor, both within the tents of science and beyond. These, at least, were his dominant intellectual qualities; but even more powerful were the qualities in him which, though allied, we distinguish as moral; and perhaps the greater part of his influence over his fellows was due to the fact that every one who met him saw in him a man bent on following the true and doing the right, swerving aside no tittle, either for the sake of reward or for fear of the enemy, a man whose uttered scorn of what was mean and cowardly was but the reciprocal of his inward love of nobleness and courage.

Bearing in mind his possession of these general qualities, we may find the key to the influence exerted by him on biological science in what he says of himself in his all too short autobiographic sketch namely, that the bent of his mind was toward mechanical problems, and that it was the force of circumstances which, frustrating his boyish wish to be a mechanical engineer, brought him to the medical profession. Probably the boyish wish was merely the natural outcome of an early feeling that the solution of mechanical problems was congenial to the clear, decisive way of thinking, to which I referred above, and which was obviously present even in the boy; and that it was not the subject-matter of mechanical problems, but the mode of treating them which interested him, is shown by the incident recorded by himself, how when he was a mere boy a too zealous attention to a post-mortem examination cost him a long illness. It is clear that the call to solve biologic problems came to him early; it is also clear that the call was a real one; and, as he himself has said, he recognized his calling when, after some years of desultory reading and lonely, irregular mental activity, he came under the influence of Wharton Jones at Charing Cross Hospital. That made him a biologist, but confirmed the natural aptitude of his mind in making him a biologist who, rejecting all shadowy, intangible views, was to direct his energies to problems which seemed capable of clear demonstrable proof. In many respects the biologic problems which lend themselves most readily to demonstrable solutions capable of verification are those which constitute what we call physiology; and if at the time of his youth the way had been open to him, Huxley would probably have become known as a physiologist. But at that time careers for physiologists were of the fewest. His master, Wharton Jones, a physiologist of the first rank, whose work in the first half of this century still