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Page 26
So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all
that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by
Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description
of _Bathybius_, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up
again on the voyage of the _Porcupine_ and examined in a fresh state
by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B. Carpenter, but they found no
better explanation to give of it. Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the
_Challenger_ expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as
expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens
gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before
as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on
the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved. Though
Haeckel--his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of
a close parallel near Greenland in 1876--would not desert Bathybius,
the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular
case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879
Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as
witty as it was candid.
Now, _Bathybius_ had often been pointed to as an example of almost
primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have
begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise
limitations of the matter, seized upon the _Bathybius_ recantation as
a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most
noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:--
That which interested me in the matter was the apparent
analogy of _Bathybius_ with other well-known forms of lower
life.... Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with
the matter, and if _Bathybius_ were brought up alive from the
bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have
the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin's
speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.
As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long
year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough
Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:--
Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I
assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the
devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on
the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.
Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:--
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in
their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to
acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was
fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with
him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was
sometimes almost terrifying. And in those days also, before custom had
hardened him, he was apt to be short with those devoid of any claim
to intervene who thrust themselves into his affairs. Salutary as this
doubtless was to the really ignorant meddler, there was one occasion,
of which I learnt thirty years later, where at bottom the rebuke was
not deserved. The sufferer, admittedly devoid of anatomical knowledge,
questioned the statement in an early edition of _The Elementary
Physiology_ as to the method in which the voice is produced, and
propounded a different movement in part of the larynx. The Professor
replied to the effect that the writer had better learn some anatomy
before challenging the result of careful experiment. But some years
later, as a result of further investigation, this same change was made
in a new edition of the book. By that time the very name of the critic
was forgotten. But if he and his suggestion had been remembered, I am
inclined to think that he would have received an _amende_.
XII
SCIENCE AND ETHICS
Huxley's work in education was his direct contribution to the social
improvement of the world. Not instruction merely--for, "though
under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be a worse"--but through education, the bringing
out of the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual
citizen, which is the one condition of the success of a State. And
this condition, resting on the basic faith in veracity, he felt to be
above all the work of science, the Cinderella of thought. For, as he
wrote:--
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