the understanding few.  Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition—­to do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and self-seeking.  Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of “her boy”; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet surely in no mere spirit of boasting.  He “left his mark somewhere, clear and distinct,” without taint of the insincerities which he had an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.

It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley did from the original line of investigation he had taken up.  Friends warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.  If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal Medal, he would easily be the first in his field.  But what he did was in great part of set purpose.  He was no mere collector of specimens, no mere describer of species.  He sought the living processes which determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification in various directions.  These excursions from the primary line of research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge.  He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own, so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them.  For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines.  He was to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by 1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of “Meisterjahre,” when, with the comprehensive views arising from such training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction to all biological science.  Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.

But the irony of circumstances diverted much of his energy into yet more diverse fields.  When Sir Henry de la Beche first offered him the posts of Palaeontologist and Lecturer on Natural History vacated by Professor Forbes, he says:—­

I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a physiological post.  But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been palaeontological.

Palaeontology was his business, and he became a Master in it also, with the result that he forged himself a mighty weapon for use in the struggle over the Origin of Species.

In one of his later Essays he compares the study of human physiology to the Atlantic Ocean:—­