Perhaps the most striking feature of Huxley’s work as a whole was its infectious nature.  His vigorous and decided personality was reflected on all the subjects to which he gave attention, and in the same fashion as his presence infected persons with a personal enthusiasm so his writings stimulated readers to efforts along the same lines.  His great influence is clear in the number and distinction of the biologists who came under his personal care, and in the great army of writers and thinkers who have been inspired by his views and methods on general questions.  His position as an actual contributor to science has to a certain extent been lost sight of for two reasons.  In the first place, his effect on the world as an expositor of the scientific method in its general application to life has overshadowed his exact work; in the second place, his exact work itself has been partly lost sight of in the new discoveries and advances to which it gave rise.  It is therefore necessary to reiterate that, apart from all his other successes, he had made for himself an extremely distinguished position in the annals of exact science.  Sir Michael Foster and Prof.  Ray Lankester, in their preface to the collected edition of his scientific memoirs, make a just claim for him.  These memoirs, they wrote, show that, “apart from the influence exerted by his popular writings, the progress of biology during the present century was largely due to labours of his of which the general public knew nothing, and that he was in some respects the most original and most fertile in discovery of all his fellow workers in the same branch of science.”

There can be little question that it was no accident that determined the direction of Huxley’s career.  He was a naturalist by inborn vocation.  The contrast between a natural bent and an acquired habit of life was well seen in the case of Huxley and Macgillivray, his companion on the Rattlesnake.  The former was appointed as a surgeon, and it was no part of his duties to busy himself with the creatures of the sea; and yet his observations on them made a series of real contributions to biological science and laid the sure foundation of a world-wide and enduring reputation.  The latter was the son of a naturalist, a naturalist by profession, and appointed to the expedition as its official naturalist; and yet he made only a few observations and a limited collection of curiosities, and even his exiguous place in the annals of zooelogy is the accidental result of his companionship with Huxley.  The special natural endowments which Huxley brought to the study of zooelogy were, in the first place, a faculty for the patient and assiduous observation of facts; in the second, a swift power of discriminating between the essential and the accessory among facts; in the third, the constructive ability to arrange these essentials in wide generalisations which we call laws or principles and which, within the limits necessarily set by inductive principles,