Chapter VIII: Part 8

Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man. That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.

Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo at a certain stage.

And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus: "The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.

It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth: "Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid down. We progress as we comply."

* * * * *

In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon another."

The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.

It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in love with her.

Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant sloop would answer her--when he got his surgeon's commission she would marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas Huxley loved but one.

Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.

In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the woman marries a man like Huxley."

* * * * *

There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.

John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from afar and said, Ha! Ha!

There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which lies in its truth.

It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same--so why raise the issue!

Darwin summed up and made nebulæ of the truths which Huxley had, up to that time, held only in gaseous form.

Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful voyage on the "Beagle."

These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years before in the South Seas.

"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending: that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the sure and necessary result of certain conditions.

Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.

Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.

Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright, complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.

Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the British Empire.

"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions: Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.

But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in time of stress.

The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements and various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"

As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"

Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned forward to catch his words.

Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere. There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.

His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his knowledge of science was general, not specific.

Huxley demolished his card house point by point, correcting the gross misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he would declare in favor of the monkey.

When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt. Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply, and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the meeting adjourned.

From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to let alone in public debate.

* * * * *

It is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.

What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.

Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most becoming.

He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she couldn't whistle."

Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of cruelty to children.

If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two.

Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender: the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his clay and he would have made a model bishop.

His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary, even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."

Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the genius of the man.

With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private acknowledged them.

On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce, Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have had Soapy Sam's job."

This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear shovel-hats."

* * * * *

When Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."

This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley--both of them royal democrats--more joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.

Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:

"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion, "Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast aspersions on men made in image of Maker."

* * * * *

The wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying, "These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole, laughed for a week.

Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being fine actors.

Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled with Him.

Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with sinners.

For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the stage, I will play the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.

John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.

At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and tyrant.

Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster of Harvard--men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder. One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the hanging of a scientist of note.

"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body," said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"

"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility is, in fact, the basic element of wit.

* * * * *

Huxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science. His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.

With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was to look upon his work and pronounce it good.

As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of prevention.

"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing were known about it.

His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society, and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies confront man on his journey through life--one when he wants a thing and can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not want it.

Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion toward devoting his life to the abnormal.

"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her, but which he repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We take our own wherever we find it.

Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most wished. Love supplies an ideal--and that is the very best thing love does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as by desire.

"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of Natural History."

And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened to be vacant.

From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in demand.

He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society; and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.

In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of Her Majesty's Navy."

Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.

Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and colleges.

Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach. To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.

The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was intellectually base.

He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric stage.

Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."

* * * * *

Humor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end. Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the mortification of having to do so.

Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against superstition and had both given and received blows.

The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within. "Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer:

4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880

My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening
caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to
Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in
Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired
nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot
to her grave.

It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly
opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less
provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the
opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be
pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.

With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have
to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking
him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently
assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right
thing for a man in his position to do.

Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance,
Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the
Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to
bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey.
George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person
whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian
practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to
dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over
the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church
considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of
which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am
I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should
most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished
for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the
greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do
not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any
personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning
to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public
grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat
one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought
and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so
called, which the world offers to those who put up with its
fetters.

Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a
profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be
deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives
than those which I have set forth at greater length than I
intended.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T. H. HUXLEY

JOHN TYNDALL

In my little book on Faraday, published in Eighteen Hundred
Sixty-eight, I have stated that he had but to will it to raise his
income, in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, to five thousand pounds a
year. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, the sum might have been
doubled. Yet this son of a blacksmith, this journeyman book-binder,
with his proud, sensitive soul, rejecting the splendid
opportunities open to him--refusing even to think them splendid in
presence of higher aims--cheerfully accepted from the Trinity House
a pittance of two hundred pounds a year.

--_John Tyndall_

JOHN TYNDALL

Tyndall was of high descent and lowly birth. His father was a member of the Irish Constabulary, and there were intervals when the boy's mother took in washing. But back of this the constable swore i' faith, when the ale was right, that he was descended from an Irish King, and probably this is true, for most Irishmen are, and acknowledge it themselves.

The father of our Tyndall spelled his name Tyndale, and traced a direct relationship to William Tyndale, who declared he would place a copy of the English Bible in the hands of every plowboy in the British Isles, and pretty nearly made good his vow. William Tyndale paid for his privileges, however. He was arrested, given an opportunity to run away, but wouldn't; then he was exiled. Finally he was incarcerated in a dungeon of the Castle Vilvoorden.

His cell was beneath the level of the ground, so was cold and damp and dark. He petitioned the governor of the prison for a coat to keep him warm and a candle by which he could read. "We'll give you both light and heat, pretty soon," was the reply.

And they did. They led Tyndale out under the blue sky and tied him to a stake set in the ground. Around his feet they piled brush, and also all of his books and papers that they could find.

A chain was put around his neck and hooked tight to the post. Then the fagots were piled high, and the fire was lighted.

"He was not burned to death," argued one of the priests who was present; "he was not burned to death. He just drew up his feet and hanged himself in the chain, and so was choked: he was that stubborn!" The father of John Tyndall was an Orangeman and had in a glass case a bit of the flag carried at the Battle of the Boyne.

It is believed, with reason, that the original flag had in it about ten thousand square yards of material. Tyndale the Orangeman was of so uncompromising a type that he occasionally arrested Catholics on general principles, like the Irishman who beat the Jew under the mistaken idea that he had something to do with crucifying "Our Savior." "But that was two thousand years ago," protested the Jew. "Niver moind; I just heard av it--take that and that!"

Zeal not wisely directed is a true Irish trait. It will not do to say that the Irish have a monopoly on stupidity, yet there have been times when I thought they nearly cornered the market. I once had charge of a gang of green Irishmen at a lumber-camp.

I started a night-school for their benefit, as their schooling had stopped at subtraction. One evening they got it into their heads that I was an atheist. Things began to come my way. I concluded discretion was the better part of valor, and so took to the woods, literally. They followed me for a mile, and then gave up the chase. On the way home they met a man who spoke ill of me, and they fell upon him and nearly pounded his life out.

I never had to lick any of my gang: they looked after this themselves. On pay-nights they all got drunk and fell upon each other--broken noses and black eyes were quite popular. Father Driscoll used to come around nearly every month and have them all sign the pledge.

That story about the Irishman who ate the rind of the watermelon "and threw the inside away," is true. That is just what the Irish do. Very often they are not able to distinguish good from bad, kindness from wrong, love from hate. Ireland has all the freedom she can use or deserves, just as we all have. What would Ireland do with freedom if she had it? Hate for England keeps peace at home. Home rule would mean home rough-house--and a most beautiful argument it would be, enforced with shillalah logic. The spirit of Donnybrook Fair is there today as much as ever, and wherever you see a head, hit it, would be home rule. Donnybrook is a condition of mind.

If England really had a grudge against Ireland and wanted to get even, she could not do better than to set her adrift.

But then the Irish impulsiveness sometimes leads to good, else how could we account for such men as O'Connor, Parnell, John Tyndall, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Arthur Wellesley and all the other Irish poets, orators and thinkers who have made us vibrate with our kind?

Transplanted weeds produce our finest flowers.

The parents of Tyndall were intent on giving their boy an education. And to them, the act of committing things to memory was education. William Tyndale gave the Bible to the people; John Tyndall would force it upon them. The "Book of Martyrs," the sermons of Jeremy Taylor, and the Bible, little John came to know by heart. And he grew to have a fine distaste for all. Once, when nearly a man grown, he had the temerity to argue with his father that the Bible might be better appreciated, if a penalty were not placed upon disbelief in its divine origin. A cuff on the ear was the answer, and John was given until sundown to apologize. He did not apologize.

And young Tyndale then vowed he would change his name to Tyndall and forever separate himself from a person whose religion was so largely mixed with brutality. But yet John Tyndale was not a bad man. He had intellect far above the average of his neighbors. He had the courage of his convictions. His son had the courage of his lack of convictions.

And the early drilling in the Bible was a good thing for young Tyndall. Bible legend and allusion color the English language, and any man who does not know his Bible well, can never hope to speak or write English with grace and fluency. Tyndall always knew and acknowledged his indebtedness to his parents, and he also knew that his salvation depended upon getting away from and beyond the narrow confines of their beliefs and habits. Because a thing helps you in a certain period of your education is no reason why you should feed upon it forevermore.

This way lies arrested development.

Life, like heat, is a mode of motion, and progress consists in discarding a good thing as soon as you have found a better.

* * * * *

Occasionally Herbert Spencer used to spend a Sunday afternoon with the Carlyles at their modest home in Chelsea. At such times Jeannie Welsh would usually manage to pilot the conversational craft along smooth waters; but if she were not present, hot arguments would follow, and finally a point would be reached where Carlyle and Spencer would simply sit and glare at each other.

"After such scenes I always thought less of two persons, Carlyle and myself," said Spencer; "and so for many years I very cautiously avoided Cheyne Row." Then there was another man Spencer avoided, although for a different reason; this individual was John Tyndall.

On the death of Tyndall, Spencer wrote:

"There has just died the greatest teacher of modern times: a man who stimulated thought in old and young, every one he met, as no one else I ever knew did. Once we went together for a much-needed rest to the Lake District. Gossip, which has its advantages in that it can be carried on with no tax on one's intellectual powers, had no part in our conversation. The discussion of great themes began at once wherever Tyndall was.

"The atmosphere of the man was intensely stimulating: everybody seemed to become great and wise and good in his presence.

"We walked on the shores of Windermere, climbed Rydal Mount, rowed across Lake Grasmere (leaving our names on the visitors' list), and all the time we dwelt upon high Olympus and talked.

"But, alas! Tyndall's vivacity undid me: two days of his company, with two sleepless nights, and I fled him as I would a pestilence."

But Carlyle growled out one thing in Spencer's presence which Spencer often quoted. "If I had my own way," said Carlyle, "I would send the sons of poor men to college, and the sons of rich men I would set to work."

Manual labor in right proportion means mental development. Too much hoe may slant the brow, but hoe in proper proportion develops the cerebellum.

In the past we have had one set of men do all the work, and another set had all the culture: one hoes and another thirsts. There are whole areas of brain-cells which are evolved only through the efforts of hand and eye, for it is the mind at last that directs all our energies. The development of brain and body go together--manual work is brain-work. Too much brain-work is just as bad as too much toil; the misuse of the pen carries just as severe a penalty as the misuse of the hoe. And it is a great satisfaction to realize that the thinking world has reached a point where these propositions do not have to be proven.

There was a time when Spencer regretted that he had not been sent to college, instead of being set to work. But later he came to regard his experience as a practical engineer and surveyor as a very precious and necessary part of his education.

John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace had an experience almost identical. In childhood John attended the village school for six months of the year, and the rest of the time helped his parents, as children of poor people do. When nineteen he went to work carrying a chain in a surveying corps. Steady attention to the business in hand brought its sure reward, and in a few years he had charge of the squad, and was given the duty of making maps and working out complex calculations in engineering.

In mathematics he especially excelled. Five years in the employ of the Irish Ordnance Survey and three years in practical railroad-building, and Tyndall got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. He resigned a good position to take part in bringing about the millennium.

That he helped the old world along toward the ideal there is no doubt; but Tyndall is dead and Jerusalem is not yet. When the rule of the barons was broken, and the stage of individualism or competition was ushered in, men said, "Lo! The time is at hand and now is." But it was not. Socialism is coming, by slow degrees, imperceptibly almost as the growing of Spring flowers that push their way from the damp, dark earth into the sunlight. And after Socialism, what? Perhaps the millennium will still be a long way off.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven, when Tyndall was twenty-seven years old, Robert Owen, one of the greatest practical men the world has ever seen, cried aloud, "The time is at hand!"

Owen was an enthusiast: all great men are. He had risen from the ranks by the absolute force of his great untiring, restless and loving spirit. From a day laborer in a cotton-mill he had become principal owner of a plant that supported five thousand people.

Owen saw the difference between joyless labor and joyful work. His mills were cleanly, orderly, sanitary, and surrounded with lawns, trees and shrubbery. He was the first man in England to establish kindergartens, and this he did at his own expense for the benefit of his helpers. He established libraries, clubs, swimming-pools, night-schools, lecture-courses. And all this time his business prospered.

To the average man it is a miracle how any one individual could bear the heaviest business burdens and still do what Robert Owen did.

Robert Owen had vitality plus: he was a gourmet for work. William Morris was just such a man, only with a bias for art; but both Owen and Morris had the intensity and impetus which get the thing done while common folks are thinking about it.

Owen was familiar with every detail of his vast business, and he was an expert in finance. Like Napoleon he said: "The finances? I will arrange them."

Robert Owen erected schoolhouses, laid out gardens, built mills, constructed tenements, traveled, lectured, and wrote books. His enthusiasm was contagious. He was never sick--he could not spare the time--and a doctor once said, "If Robert Owen ever dies, it will be through too much Robert Owen."

Owen went over to Dublin on one of his tours, and lectured on the ideal life, which to him was Socialism, "each for all and all for each."

Fourier, the dreamer, supplied a good deal of the argument, but Robert Owen did the thing. Socialism always catches these two classes, doers and dreamers, workers and drones, honest men and rogues, those with a desire to give and those with a lust to get.

Among others who heard Owen speak at Dublin was the young Irish engineer, John Tyndall. Tyndall was the type of man that must be common before we can have Socialism. There was not a lazy hair in his head; aye, nor a selfish one, either. He had a tender heart, a receptive brain and the spirit of obedience, the spirit that gives all without counting the cost, the spirit that harkens to the God within. And need I say that the person who gives all, gets all! The economics of God are very simple: We receive only that which we give. The only love we keep is the love we give away.

These are very old truths--I did not discover nor invent them--they are not covered by copyright: "Cast thy bread upon the waters."

John Tyndall was melted by Owen's passionate appeal of each for all and all for each. To live for humanity seemed the one desirable thing. His loving Irish heart was melted. He sought Owen out at his hotel, and they talked, talked till three o'clock in the morning.

Owen was a judge of men; his success depended upon this one thing, as that of every successful business must. He saw that Tyndall was a rare soul and nearly fulfilled his definition of a gentleman. Tyndall had hope, faith and splendid courage; but best of all, he had that hunger for truth which classes him forever among the sacred few.

During his work out of doors on surveying trips he had studied the strata; gotten on good terms with birds, bugs and bees; he knew the flowers and weeds, and loved all the animate things of Nature, so that he recognized their kinship to himself, and he hesitated to kill or destroy.

Education is a matter of desire, and a man like Tyndall is getting an education wherever he is. All is grist that comes to his mill.

Robert Owen had but recently started "Queenswood College" in Hampshire, and nothing would do but Tyndall should go there as a teacher of science.

"Is he a skilled and educated teacher?" some one asked Owen. "Better than that," replied Owen; "he is a regular firebrand of enthusiasm."

And so Tyndall resigned his position with the railroad and moved over to England, taking up his home at "Harmony Hall."

Harmony Hall was a beautiful brick building with the letters C. M. carved on the cornerstone in recognition of the Commencement of the Millennium. The pupils were mostly workers in the Owen mills who had shown some special aptitude for education. The pupils and teachers all worked at manual labor a certain number of hours daily. There was a delightful feeling of comradeship about the institution. Tyndall was happy in his work.

He gave lectures on everything, and taught the things that no one else could teach, and of course he got more out of the lessons than any of the scholars.

But after a few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent autocracy, a sample of one-man power, beautifully expressed.

Robert Owen planned it, built it, directed it and made good any financial deficit. Instead of Socialism it was a kindly despotism. A few of the scholars did their level best to help themselves and help the place, but the rest didn't think and didn't care. They were passengers who enjoyed the cushioned seats. A few, while partaking of the privileges of the place, denounced it.

"You can not educate people who do not want to be educated," said Tyndall. The value of an education lies in the struggle to get it. Do too much for people, and they will do nothing for themselves.

Many of the students at Harmony Hall had been sent there by Owen, because he, in the greatness of his heart and the blindness of his zeal, thought they needed education. They may have needed it; but they did not want it: ease was their aim.

The indifference and ingratitude Robert Owen met with did not discourage him: it only gave him an occasional pause. He thought that the bad example of English society was too close to his experiments: it vitiated the atmosphere.

So he came over to America and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana. The fine solid buildings he erected in Posey County, then a wilderness, are still there.

As for the most romantic and interesting history of New Harmony, Robert Owen and his socialistic experiments, I must refer the gentle reader to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work I have found very useful in the course of making my original researches.

After a year at Harmony Hall, Tyndall saw that he would have to get out or else become a victim of arrested development, through too much acceptance of a strong man's bounty. "You can not afford to accept anything for nothing," he said. Life at Harmony Hall to him was very much like life in a monastery, to which stricken men flee when the old world seems too much for them. "When all the people live the ideal life, I'll live it; but until then I'm only one of the great many strugglers." Besides, he felt that in missing university training he had dropped something out of his life. Now he would go to Germany and see for himself what he had missed.

While railroading he had saved up nearly four hundred pounds. This money he had offered at one time to invest in shares in the Owen mills. But Robert Owen said, "Wait two years and then see how you feel!"

Robert Owen was not a financial exploiter. Tyndall may have differed with him in a philosophic way; but they never ceased to honor and respect each other.

And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.

* * * * *

Robert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.

Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke of it as a "message from the gods."

He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.

Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his translation of the Bible.

At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called "Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law not understood.

Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a continual temptation.

But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly enacts his best."

Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled energetically."

One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."

The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason: Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself, even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own; it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he has done--like a star, unhasting and unresting."

* * * * *

At Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his classes.

These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.

Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen lecture at Marburg and complimented Tyndall by saying, "When I take up sleight-of-hand work, consider yourself engaged as my first helper." Tyndall's way of standing with his back to the audience, shutting off the view of Bunsen's hands while he was getting ready to make an artificial peal of thunder, made Humboldt laugh heartily.

Humboldt thought so well of the young man who spoke German with an Irish accent, that he presented him with an inscribed copy of one of his books. The volume was a most valuable one, for Humboldt published only in deluxe, limited editions, and Tyndall was so overcome that all he could say was, "I'll do as much for you some day." Not long after this, through loaning money to a fellow student, Tyndall found himself sadly in need of funds, and borrowed two pounds on the book from an 'Ebrew Jew.

That night, he dreamed that Humboldt found the volume in a secondhand store. In the morning, Tyndall was waiting for the pawnbroker to open his shop to get the book back ere the offense was discovered.

Heinrich Heine once inscribed a volume of his poems to a friend, and afterward discovered the volume on the counter of a secondhand dealer. He thereupon haggled with the bookman, bought the book and beneath his first inscription wrote, "With the renewed regards of H. Heine." He then sent the volume for the second time to his friend. 'T is possible that Tyndall had heard of this.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when Tyndall was thirty years of age, he visited London, and of course went to the British Institution. There he met Faraday for the first time and was welcomed by him.

The British Institution consists of a laboratory, a museum and a lecture-hall, and its object is scientific research. It began in a very simple way in one room and now occupies several buildings.