In looking through the Collected Essays, which represent his non-technical contributions to knowledge, there may be regret that throughout his life circumstances were against his doing any piece of long-sustained work, such as that which, for example, the affluence and patience of Darwin permitted him to do. But until Huxley's later years, and, indeed, through broken health to the end, his work outside official demands had to be done fitfully and piecemeal, or not at all. Notwithstanding this, it has the unity which is inspired by a central idea. The application of the theory of evolution all round imparts a quality of relation to subjects seemingly diverse. And this comes out clearly and strongly in the more orderly arrangement of the material in the new issue of Collected Essays. These show what an omnivorous reader he was; how well equipped in classics, theology, and general literature, in addition to subjects distinctly his own. He sympathized with every branch of culture. As contrasted with physical science, he said, "Nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a very prominent branch of education." One corner of his library was filled with a strange company of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called "the condemned cell." When looking at the "strange bedfellows" that slept on the shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a style whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seems unborrowed; and he at once named the masculine and pellucid Leviathan of Hobbes. He had the happy faculty of rapidly assimilating what he read; of clearly grasping an opponent's standpoint; and what is a man's salvation nowadays, freedom from that curse of specialism which kills all sense of proportion, and reduces its slave to the level of the machine-hand that spends his life in making the heads of screws. He believed in "scepticism as the highest duty, and in blind faith as the one unpardonable sin." "And," he adds, "it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates holds them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation--Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification." Therefore he nursed no illusions; would not say that he knew when he did not or could not know, and bidding us follow the evidence whithersoever it leads us, remains the surest-footed guide of our time. Such