His public life may be said to date from 1854. The duties which he then undertook included the delivery of a course of lectures to working men every alternate year. Some of these--models of their kind--have been reissued in the Collected Essays. Among the most notable are those on Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature. At the outset of his public career lecturing was as distasteful to him as in earlier years the trouble of writing was detestable. But mother wit and "needs must" trained him in a short time to win the ear of an audience. One evening in 1852 he made his début at the Royal Institution, and the next day he received a letter charging him with every possible fault that a lecturer could commit--ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in use of hands, mumbling of words, or dropping them down the shirt front. The lesson was timely, and its effect salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and it is worth recording--if but as encouragement to stammerers who have something to say--at what price he "bought this freedom" which held an audience spellbound. How he thus held it in later years they will remember who in the packed theatre of the Royal Institution listened on the evening of Friday, 9th of April, 1880, to his lecture On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species. In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps with Tyndall, the result appearing in their joint authorship of a paper on Glacial Phenomena in the Philosophical Transactions of the following year. But this was a rare interlude. What time could be wrested from daily routine was given to the study of invertebrate and vertebrate morphology, palæontology, and ethnology, familiarity with which was no mean equipment for the conflict soon to rage round these seemingly pacific materials when their deep import was declared. The outcome of such varied industry is apparent to the student of scientific memoirs. But a recital of the titles of papers contributed to these, as e. g., On Ceratodus, Hyperodapedon Gordoni, Hypsilophodon, Telerpeton, and so forth, will not here tend to edification. The original and elaborate investigations which they embody have had recognition in the degrees and medals which decorated the illustrious author. But it is not by these that Huxley's renown as one of the most richly-endowed and widely-cultured personalities of the Victorian era will endure. They might sink into the oblivion which buries most purely technical work without in any way affecting that foremost place which he fills in the ranks of philosophical biologists both as clear-headed thinker and luminous interpreter.