Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/346

338 president of the Royal Society, and Tyndall. It was started in 1864, and nearly nineteen years passed before we had a single loss—that of Spottiswoode; and Hooker, Spencer and I are now, alas! the only remaining members. We used to dine together once a month, except in July, August and September. There were no papers or formal discussions, but the idea was to secure more frequent meetings of a few friends who were bound together by common interests and aims, and strong feelings of personal affection. It has never been formally dissolved, but the last meeting was in 1893.

In 1869 the Metaphysical Society, of which I shall have something more to say later on, was started.

From 1870 to 1875 I was sitting with Huxley on the late Duke of Devonshire's Commission on Scientific Instruction; we had innumerable meetings, and we made many recommendations which are being by degrees adopted.

I had also the pleasure of spending some delightful holidays with him in Switzerland, in Brittany and in various parts of England. Lastly, I sat by his side in the Sheldonian Theater at the British Association meeting at Oxford, during Lord Salisbury's address, to which I listened with all the more interest knowing that he was to second the vote of thanks, and wondering how he would do it. At one passage we looked at one another, and he whispered to me, "Oh, my dear Lubbock, how I wish we were going to discuss the address in Section D instead of here!" Not, indeed, that he would have omitted any part of his speech, but there were other portions of the address which he would have been glad to have criticised. I was, therefore, for many years in close and intimate association with him.

Huxley showed from early youth a determination, in the words of Jean Paul Richter, 'to make the most that was possible out of the stuff/ and this was a great deal, for the material was excellent. He took the wise advice to consume more oil than wine, and, what is better even than midnight oil, he made the most of the sweet morning air.

In his youth he was a voracious reader and devoured everything he could lay his hand on, from the Bible to Hamilton's 'Essay on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.' He tells us of himself that when he was a mere boy he had a perverse tendency to think when he ought to have been playing.

Considering how preeminent he was as a naturalist, it is rather surprising to hear, as he has himself told us, that his own desire was to be a mechanical engineer. "The only part," he said, "of my professional course which really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me; I never collected anything,