Thomas Henry Huxley was born on the 4th of May, 1825, at Ealing, then a little country village, now united to London as a great suburb.  He was the seventh child of George Huxley, who was second master at the school of Dr. Nicholson at Ealing.  In these days private schools of varying character were very numerous in England, and this establishment seems to have been of high-class character, for Cardinal Newman and many other distinguished men received part of their education there.  His mother, whose maiden name was Rachel Withers, was, he tells us himself:[A]

“A slender brunette of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman’s head.  With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity.  Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought.  If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, ’I cannot help it.  Things flash across me.’  That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength:  it has often stood me in good stead:  it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger.  But, after all, if my time were to come over again there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of ‘mother wit.’”

From his father he thinks that he inherited little except an inborn capacity for drawing, “a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.”  As it happened, this natural gift for drawing proved of the greatest service to him throughout his career.  It is imperative that every investigator of the anatomy of plants and animals should be able to sketch his observations, and there is no greater aid to seeing things as they are than the continuous attempt to reproduce them by pencil or brush.

Huxley was christened Thomas Henry, and he was unaware why these names were chosen, but he humorously records the curious chance that his parents should have chosen for him the “name of that particular apostle with whom he had always felt most sympathy.”

Of his childhood little is recorded.  He remembers being vain of his curls, and his mother’s expressed regret that he soon lost the beauty of early childhood.  He attended for some time the school at Ealing with which his father was associated, but he has little to say for the training he received there.  He writes: 

“My regular school training was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately:  for, though my way of life has made me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst I have ever known.  We boys were average lads with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral