A great body of fine work in science and literature has been produced by persons who may be described as typically academic. Such persons confine their interest in life within the boundaries of their own immediate pursuits; they are absorbed so completely by their avocations that the hurly-burly of the world seems needlessly distracting and a little vulgar. No doubt the thoughts of those who cry out most loudly against disturbance by the intruding claims of the world are, for the most part, hardly worth disturbing; the attitude to extrinsic things of those who are absorbed by their work is aped not infrequently by those who are absorbed only in themselves. None the less it is important to recognise that a genuine aversion from affairs is characteristic of many fine original investigators, and it is on such persons that the idea of the simple and childlike nature of philosophers, a simplicity often reaching real incapacity for the affairs of life, is based. There was no trace of this natural isolation in the character of Huxley. He was not only a serious student of science but a keen and zealous citizen, eagerly conscious of the great social and political movements around him, with the full sense that he was a man living in society with other men and that there was a business of life as well as a business of the laboratory. We have seen with what zeal he brought his trained intelligence to bear not only on his own province of scientific education, but on the wider problems of general education, and yet the time he gave to these was only a small part of that which he spared from abstract science for affairs. In scientific institutions as in others, there is always a considerable amount of business, involving the management of men and the management of money, and Huxley's readiness and aptitude led to his being largely occupied with these. For many years he was Dean of the Royal College of Science at South Kensington, and for a considerable time he served the Geological Society and the Royal Society as secretary. In all these posts, Huxley displayed great capacity as a leader of men and as a manager of affairs, and contributed largely to the successful working of the institutions which he served.