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THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE THOMAS H. HUXLEY EDITOR'S NOTE
Of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century Thomas Henry Huxley
son of an Ealing schoolmaster was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His
researches in biology his contributions to scientific controversy his
pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably
had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And
yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his
father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of
education. "I had" he said "two years of a pandemonium of a school
(between eight and ten) and after that neither help nor sympathy in any
intellectual direction till I reached manhood." When he was twelve a
craving for reading found satisfaction in Hutton's "Geology" and when
fifteen in Hamilton's "Logic."
At seventeen Huxley entered as a student at Charing Cross Hospital and
three years later he was M.B. and the possessor of the gold medal for
anatomy and physiology. An appointment as surgeon in the navy proved
to be the entry to Huxley's great scientific career for he was
gazetted to the "Rattlesnake" commissioned for surveying work in
Torres Straits. He was attracted by the teeming surface life of
tropical seas and his study of it was the commencement of that
revolution in scientific knowledge ultimately brought about by his
researches.
Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4 1825 and died at
Eastbourne June 29 1895.
LECTURES AND ESSAYS BY T.H. HUXLEY
ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE
NOTICE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The Publisher of these interesting Lectures having made an arrangement
for their publication with Mr. J. A. Mays the Reporter begs to append
the following note from Professor Huxley:--
"Mr. J. Aldous Mays who is taking shorthand notes of my 'Lectures to
Working Men' has asked me to allow him on his own account to print
those Notes for the use of my audience. I willingly accede to this
request on the understanding that a notice is prefixed to the effect
that I have no leisure to revise the Lectures or to make alterations
in them beyond the correction of any important error in a matter of
fact."
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.
When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six
lectures [*To Working Men at the Museum of Practical Geology 1863.]
which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you it occurred
to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a
true light or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call that
which I conceive myself to be the true light the position of a book
which has been more praised and more abused perhaps than any book
which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the
"Origin of Species". That work I doubt not many of you have read;
for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife among you. At any rate
all of you will have heard of it--some by one kind of report and some
by another kind of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of
all have been probably more or less excited on the subject of that
work. All I can do and all I shall attempt to do is to put before
you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man who of
course is liable to judge erroneously; but at any rate of one whose
business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this
nature.
And here as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive
subject the greater part of my course--if indeed so small a number
of lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to
preliminary matters or rather to a statement of those facts and of
those principles which the work itself dwells upon and brings more or
less directly before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of
you are naturalists; and even if you were the misconceptions and
misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists on these matters
would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to
take--that I should start from the beginning--that I should endeavour
to point out what is the existing state of the organic world--that I
should point out its past condition--that I should state what is the
precise nature of the undertaking which Mr. Darwin has taken in hand;
that I should endeavour to show you what are the only methods by which
that undertaking can be brought to an issue and to point out to you
how far the author of the work in question has satisfied those
conditions how far he has not satisfied them how far they are
satisfiable by man and how far they are not satisfiable by man.
To-night in taking up the first part of this question I shall
endeavour to put before you a sort of broad notion of our knowledge of
the condition of the living world. There are many ways of doing this.
I might deal with it pictorially and graphically. Following the
example of Humboldt in his "Aspects of Nature" I might endeavour to
point out the infinite variety of organic life in every mode of its
existence with reference to the variations of climate and the like;
and such an attempt would be fraught with interest to us all; but
considering the subject before us such a course would not be that best
calculated to assist us. In an argument of this kind we must go
further and dig deeper into the matter; we must endeavour to look into
the foundations of living Nature if I may so say and discover the
principles involved in some of her most secret operations. I propose
therefore in the first place to take some ordinary animal with which
you are all familiar and by easily comprehensible and obvious
examples drawn from it to show what are the kind of problems which
living beings in general lay before us; and I shall then show you that
the same problems are laid open to us by all kinds of living beings.
But first let me say in what sense I have used the words "organic
nature." In speaking of the causes which lead to our present knowledge
of organic nature I have used it almost as an equivalent of the word
"living" and for this reason--that in almost all living beings you
can distinguish several distinct portions set apart to do particular
things and work in a particular way. These are termed "organs" and
the whole together is called "organic." And as it is universally
characteristic of them this term "organic" has been very conveniently
employed to denote the whole of living nature--the whole of the plant
world and the whole of the animal world.
Few animals can be more familiar to you than that whose skeleton is
shown on our diagram. You need not bother yourselves with this "Equus
caballus" written under it; that is only the Latin name of it and does
not make it any better. It simply means the common Horse. Suppose we
wish to understand all about the Horse. Our first object must be to
study the structure of the animal. The whole of his body is inclosed
within a hide a skin covered with hair; and if that hide or skin be
taken off we find a great mass of flesh or what is technically called
muscle being the substance which by its power of contraction enables
the animal to move. These muscles move the hard parts one upon the
other and so give that strength and power of motion which renders the
Horse so useful to us in the performance of those services in which we
employ him.
And then on separating and removing the whole of this skin and flesh
you have a great series of bones hard structures bound together with
ligaments and forming the skeleton which is represented here.
[FIGURE 1. (Section through a horse.)
FIGURE 2. (Section through a cell.)]
In that skeleton there are a number of parts to be recognized. The
long series of bones beginning from the skull and ending in the tail
is called the spine and those in front are the ribs; and then there
are two pairs of limbs one before and one behind; and there are what
we all know as the fore-legs and the hind-legs. If we pursue our
researches into the interior of this animal we find within the
framework of the skeleton a great cavity or rather I should say two
great cavities--one cavity beginning in the skull and running through
the neck-bones along the spine and ending in the tail containing the
brain and the spinal marrow which are extremely important organs. The
second great cavity commencing with the mouth contains the gullet
the stomach the long intestine and all the rest of those internal
apparatus which are essential for digestion; and then in the same great
cavity there are lodged the heart and all the great vessels going from
it; and besides that the organs of respiration-- the lungs: and then
the kidneys and the organs of reproduction and so on. Let us now
endeavour to reduce this notion of a horse that we now have to some
such kind of simple expression as can be at once and without
difficulty retained in the mind apart from all minor details. If I
make a transverse section that is if I were to saw a dead horse
across I should find that if I left out the details and supposing I
took my section through the anterior region and through the
fore-limbs I should have here this kind of section of the body (Fig.
1). Here would be the upper part of the animal--that great mass of
bones that we spoke of as the spine (a Fig. 1). Here I should have
the alimentary canal (b Fig. 1). Here I should have the heart (c
Fig. 1); and then you see there would be a kind of double tube the
whole being inclosed within the hide; the spinal marrow would be placed
in the upper tube (a Fig. 1) and in the lower tube (d d Fig. 1)
there would be the alimentary canal (b) and the heart (c); and here I
shall have the legs proceeding from each side. For simplicity's sake
I represent them merely as stumps (e e Fig. 1). Now that is a
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Unpublished Work 
