Chapter 4

(T. F.; X.)

1SeeBelfast Magazinefor August 1813.

1SeeBelfast Magazinefor August 1813.

HUTCHINSON, ANNE(c.1600-1643), American religious enthusiast, leader of the “Antinomians” in New England, was born in Lincolnshire, England, about 1600. She was the daughter of a clergyman named Francis Marbury, and, according to tradition, was a cousin of John Dryden. She married William Hutchinson, and in 1634 emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, as a follower and admirer of the Rev. John Cotton. Her orthodoxy was suspected and for a time she was not admitted to the church, but soon she organized meetings among the Boston women, among whom her exceptional ability and her services as a nurse had given her great influence; and at these meetings she discussed and commented upon recent sermons and gave expression to her own theological views. The meetings became increasingly popular, and were soon attended not only by the women but even by some of the ministers and magistrates, including Governor Henry Vane. At these meetings she asserted that she, Cotton and her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheelwright—whom she was trying to make second “teacher” in the Boston church—were under a “covenant of grace,” that they had a special inspiration, a “peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost,” whereas the Rev. John Wilson, the pastor of the Boston church, and the other ministers of the colony were under a “covenant of works.” Anne Hutchinson was, in fact, voicing a protest against the legalism of the Massachusetts Puritans, and was also striking at the authority of the clergy in an intensely theocratic community. In such a community a theological controversy inevitably was carried into secular politics, and the entire colony was divided into factions. Mrs Hutchinson was supported by Governor Vane, Cotton, Wheelwright and the great majority of the Boston church; opposed to her were Deputy-Governor John Winthrop, Wilson and all of the country magistrates and churches. At a general fast, held late in January 1637, Wheelwright preached a sermon which was taken as a criticism of Wilson and his friends. The strength of the parties was tested at the General Court of Election of May 1637, when Winthrop defeated Vane for the governorship. Cotton recanted, Vane returned to England in disgust, Wheelwright was tried and banished and the rank and file either followed Cotton in making submission or suffered various minor punishments. Mrs Hutchinson was tried (November 1637) by the General Court chiefly for “traducing the ministers,” and was sentenced to banishment; later, in March 1638, she was tried before the Boston church and was formally excommunicated. With William Coddington (d. 1678), John Clarke and others, she established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck (now Rhode Island) in 1638. Four years later, after the death of her husband, she settled on Long Island Sound near what is now New Rochelle, Westchester county, New York, and was killed in an Indian rising in August 1643, an event regarded in Massachusetts as a manifestation of Divine Providence. Anne Hutchinson and her followers were called “Antinomians,” probably more as a term of reproach than with any special reference to her doctrinal theories; and the controversy in which she was involved is known as the “Antinomian Controversy.”

See C. F. Adams,Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, vol. xiv. of the Prince Society Publications (Boston, 1894); andThree Episodes of Massachusetts History(Boston and New York, 1896).

See C. F. Adams,Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, vol. xiv. of the Prince Society Publications (Boston, 1894); andThree Episodes of Massachusetts History(Boston and New York, 1896).

HUTCHINSON, JOHN(1615-1664), Puritan soldier, son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson of Owthorpe, Nottinghamshire, and of Margaret, daughter of Sir John Byron of Newstead, was baptized on the 18th of September 1615. He was educated at Nottingham and Lincoln schools and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1637 he entered Lincoln’s Inn. On the outbreak of the great Rebellion he took the side of the Parliament, and was made in 1643 governor of Nottingham Castle, which he defended against external attacks and internal divisions, till the triumph of the parliamentary cause. He was chosen member for Nottinghamshire in March 1646, took the side of the Independents, opposed the offers of the king at Newport, and signed the death-warrant. Though a member at first of the council of state, he disapproved of the subsequent political conduct of Cromwell and took no further part in politics during the lifetime of the protector. He resumed his seat in the recalled Long Parliament in May 1659, and followed Monk in opposing Lambert, believing that the former intended to maintain the commonwealth. He was returned to the Convention Parliament for Nottingham but expelled on the 9th of June 1660, and while not excepted from the Act of Indemnity was declared incapable of holding public office. In October 1663, however, he was arrested upon suspicion of being concerned in the Yorkshire plot, and after a rigorous confinement in the Tower of London, of which he published an account (reprinted in the HarleianMiscellany, vol. iii.), and in Sandown Castle, Kent, he died on the 11th of September 1664. His career draws its chief interest from theLifeby his wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, writtenafter the death of her husband but not published till 1806 (since often reprinted), a work not only valuable for the picture which it gives of the man and of the time in which he lived, but for the simple beauty of its style, and the naïveté with which the writer records her sentiments and opinions, and details the incidents of her private life.

See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson’sMemoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinsonby C. H. Firth (1885);Brit. Mus. Add. MSS.25,901 (a fragment of the Life), alsoAdd. MSS.19, 333, 36,247 f. 51;Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422;Monk’s Contemporaries, by Guizot.

See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson’sMemoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinsonby C. H. Firth (1885);Brit. Mus. Add. MSS.25,901 (a fragment of the Life), alsoAdd. MSS.19, 333, 36,247 f. 51;Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422;Monk’s Contemporaries, by Guizot.

HUTCHINSON, JOHN(1674-1737), English theological writer, was born at Spennithorne, Yorkshire, in 1674. He served as steward in several families of position, latterly in that of the duke of Somerset, who ultimately obtained for him the post of riding purveyor to the master of the horse, a sinecure worth about £200 a year. In 1700 he became acquainted with Dr John Woodward (1665-1728) physician to the duke and author of a work entitledThe Natural History of the Earth, to whom he entrusted a large number of fossils of his own collecting, along with a mass of manuscript notes, for arrangement and publication. A misunderstanding as to the manner in which these should be dealt with was the immediate occasion of the publication by Hutchinson in 1724 ofMoses’s Principia, part i., in which Woodward’sNatural Historywas bitterly ridiculed, his conduct with regard to the mineralogical specimens not obscurely characterized, and a refutation of the Newtonian doctrine of gravitation seriously attempted. It was followed by part ii. in 1727, and by various other works, includingMoses’s Sine Principio, 1730;The Confusion of Tongues and Trinity of the Gentiles, 1731;Power Essential and Mechanical, or what power belongs to God and what to his creatures, in which the design of Sir I. Newton and Dr Samuel Clarke is laid open, 1732;Glory or Gravity, 1733;The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist Delineated, 1736. He taught that the Bible contained the elements not only of true religion but also of all rational philosophy. He held that the Hebrew must be read without points, and his interpretation rested largely on fanciful symbolism. Bishop George Home of Norwich was during some of his earlier years an avowed Hutchinsonian; and William Jones of Nayland continued to be so to the end of his life.

A complete edition of his publications, edited by Robert Spearman and Julius Bate, appeared in 1748 (12 vols.); anAbstractof these followed in 1753; and aSupplement, withLifeby Spearman prefixed, in 1765.

A complete edition of his publications, edited by Robert Spearman and Julius Bate, appeared in 1748 (12 vols.); anAbstractof these followed in 1753; and aSupplement, withLifeby Spearman prefixed, in 1765.

HUTCHINSON, SIR JONATHAN(1828-  ), English surgeon and pathologist, was born on the 23rd of July 1828 at Selby, Yorkshire, his parents belonging to the Society of Friends. He entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1850 (F.R.C.S. 1862), and rapidly gained reputation as a skilful operator and a scientific inquirer. He was president of the Hunterian Society in 1869 and 1870, professor of surgery and pathology at the College of Surgeons from 1877 to 1882, president of the Pathological Society, 1879-1880, of the Ophthalmological Society, 1883, of the Neurological Society, 1887, of the Medical Society, 1890, and of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical in 1894-1896. In 1889 he was president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was a member of two Royal Commissions, that of 1881 to inquire into the provision for smallpox and fever cases in the London hospitals, and that of 1889-1896 on vaccination and leprosy. He also acted as honorary secretary to the Sydenham Society. His activity in the cause of scientific surgery and in advancing the study of the natural sciences was unwearying. His lectures on neuro-pathogenesis, gout, leprosy, diseases of the tongue, &c., were full of original observation; but his principal work was connected with the study of syphilis, on which he became the first living authority. He was the founder of the London Polyclinic or Postgraduate School of Medicine; and both in his native town of Selby and at Haslemere, Surrey, he started (about 1890) educational museums for popular instruction in natural history. He published several volumes on his own subjects, was editor of the quarterlyArchives of Surgery, and was given the Hon. LL.D. degree by both Glasgow and Cambridge. After his retirement from active consultative work he continued to take great interest in the question of leprosy, asserting the existence of a definite connexion between this disease and the eating of salted fish. He received a knighthood in 1908.

HUTCHINSON, THOMAS(1711-1780), the last royal governor of the province of Massachusetts, son of a wealthy merchant of Boston, Mass., was born there on the 9th of September 1711. He graduated at Harvard in 1727, then became an apprentice in his father’s counting-room, and for several years devoted himself to business. In 1737 he began his public career as a member of the Boston Board of Selectmen, and a few weeks later he was elected to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, of which he was a member until 1740 and again from 1742 to 1749, serving as speaker in 1747, 1748 and 1749. He consistently contended for a sound financial system, and vigorously opposed the operations of the “Land Bank” and the issue of pernicious bills of credit. In 1748 he carried through the General Court a bill providing for the cancellation and redemption of the outstanding paper currency. Hutchinson went to England in 1740 as the representative of Massachusetts in a boundary dispute with New Hampshire. He was a member of the Massachusetts Council from 1749 to 1756, was appointed judge of probate in 1752 and was chief justice of the superior court of the province from 1761 to 1769, was lieutenant-governor from 1758 to 1771, acting as governor in the latter two years, and from 1771 to 1774 was governor. In 1754 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Albany Convention, and, with Franklin, was a member of the committee appointed to draw up a plan of union. Though he recognized the legality of the Stamp Act of 1765, he considered the measure inexpedient and impolitic and urged its repeal, but his attitude was misunderstood; he was considered by many to have instigated the passage of the Act, and in August 1765 a mob sacked his Boston residence and destroyed many valuable manuscripts and documents. He was acting governor at the time of the “Boston Massacre” in 1770, and was virtually forced by the citizens of Boston, under the leadership of Samuel Adams, to order the removal of the British troops from the town. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary disturbances in Massachusetts he was the representative of the British ministry, and though he disapproved of some of the ministerial measures he felt impelled to enforce them and necessarily incurred the hostility of the Whig or Patriot element. In 1774, upon the appointment of General Thomas Gage as military governor he went to England, and acted as an adviser to George III. and the British ministry on American affairs, uniformly counselling moderation. He died at Brompton, now part of London, on the 3rd of June 1780.

He wroteA Brief Statement of the Claim of the Colonies(1764); aCollection of Original Papers relative to the History of Massachusetts Bay(1769), reprinted asThe Hutchinson Papersby the Prince Society in 1865; and a judicious, accurate and very valuableHistory of the Province of Massachusetts Bay(vol. i., 1764, vol. ii., 1767, and vol. iii., 1828). HisDiary and Letters, with an Account of his Administration, was published at Boston in 1884-1886.See James K. Hosmer’sLife of Thomas Hutchinson(Boston, 1896), and a biographical chapter in John Fiske’sEssays Historical and Literary(New York, 1902). For an estimate of Hutchinson as an historian, see M. C. Tyler’sLiterary History of the American Revolution(New York, 1897).

He wroteA Brief Statement of the Claim of the Colonies(1764); aCollection of Original Papers relative to the History of Massachusetts Bay(1769), reprinted asThe Hutchinson Papersby the Prince Society in 1865; and a judicious, accurate and very valuableHistory of the Province of Massachusetts Bay(vol. i., 1764, vol. ii., 1767, and vol. iii., 1828). HisDiary and Letters, with an Account of his Administration, was published at Boston in 1884-1886.

See James K. Hosmer’sLife of Thomas Hutchinson(Boston, 1896), and a biographical chapter in John Fiske’sEssays Historical and Literary(New York, 1902). For an estimate of Hutchinson as an historian, see M. C. Tyler’sLiterary History of the American Revolution(New York, 1897).

HUTCHINSON,a city and the county-seat of Reno county, Kansas, U.S.A., in the broad bottom-land on the N. side of the Arkansas river. Pop. (1900) 9379, of whom 414 were foreign-born and 442 negroes; (1910 census) 16,364. It is served by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, the Missouri Pacific and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways. The principal public buildings are the Federal building and the county court house. The city has a public library, and an industrial reformatory is maintained here by the state. Hutchinson is situated in a stock-raising, fruit-growing and farming region (the principal products of which are wheat, Indian corn and fodder), with which it has a considerable wholesale trade. An enormous deposit of rock salt underlies the city and its vicinity,and Hutchinson’s principal industry is the manufacture (by the open-pan and grainer processes) and the shipping of salt; the city has one of the largest salt plants in the world. Among the other manufactures are flour, creamery products, soda-ash, straw-board, planing-mill products and packed meats. Natural gas is largely used as a factory fuel. The city’s factory product was valued at $2,031,048 in 1905, an increase of 31.8% since 1900. Hutchinson was chartered as a city In 1871.

HUTTEN, PHILIPP VON(c.1511-1546), German knight, was a relative of Ulrich von Hutten and passed some of his early years at the court of the emperor Charles V. Later he joined the band of adventurers which under Georg Hohermuth, or George of Spires, sailed to Venezuela, or Venosala as Hutten calls it, with the object of conquering and exploiting this land in the interests of the Augsburg family of Welser. The party landed at Coro in February 1535 and Hutten accompanied Hohermuth on his long and toilsome expedition into the interior in search of treasure. After the death of Hohermuth in December 1540 he became captain-general of Venezuela. Soon after this event he vanished into the interior, returning after five years of wandering to find that a Spaniard, Juan de Caravazil, or Caravajil, had been appointed governor in his absence. With his travelling companion, Bartholomew Welser the younger, he was seized by Caravazil in April 1546 and the two were afterwards put to death.

Hutten left some letters, and also a narrative of the earlier part of his adventures, thisZeitung aus India Junkher Philipps von Huttenbeing published in 1785.

Hutten left some letters, and also a narrative of the earlier part of his adventures, thisZeitung aus India Junkher Philipps von Huttenbeing published in 1785.

HUTTEN, ULRICH VON(1488-1523), was born on the 21st of April 1488, at the castle of Steckelberg, near Fulda, in Hesse. Like Erasmus or Pirckheimer, he was one of those men who form the bridge between Humanists and Reformers. He lived with both, sympathized with both, though he died before the Reformation had time fully to develop. His life may be divided into four parts:—his youth and cloister-life (1488-1504); his wanderings in pursuit of knowledge (1504-1515); his strife with Ulrich of Württemberg (1515-1519); and his connexion with the Reformation (1519-1523). Each of these periods had its own special antagonism, which coloured Hutten’s career: in the first, his horror of dull monastic routine; in the second, the ill-treatment he met with at Greifswald; in the third, the crime of Duke Ulrich; in the fourth, his disgust with Rome and with Erasmus. He was the eldest son of a poor and not undistinguished knightly family. As he was mean of stature and sickly his father destined him for the cloister, and he was sent to the Benedictine house at Fulda; the thirst for learning there seized on him, and in 1505 he fled from the monastic life, and won his freedom with the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and at the cost of incurring his father’s undying anger. From the Fulda cloister he went first to Cologne, next to Erfurt, and then to Frankfort-on-Oder on the opening in 1506 of the new university of that town. For a time he was in Leipzig, and in 1508 we find him a shipwrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast. In 1509 the university of Greifswald welcomed him, but here too those who at first received him kindly became his foes; the sensitive ill-regulated youth, who took the liberties of genius, wearied his burgher patrons; they could not brook the poet’s airs and vanity, and ill-timed assertions of his higher rank. Wherefore he left Greifswald, and as he went was robbed of clothes and books, his only baggage, by the servants of his late friends; in the dead of winter, half starved, frozen, penniless, he reached Rostock. Here again the Humanists received him gladly, and under their protection he wrote against his Greifswald patrons, thus beginning the long list of his satires and fierce attacks on personal or public foes. Rostock could not hold him long; he wandered on to Wittenberg and Leipzig, and thence to Vienna, where he hoped to win the emperor Maximilian’s favour by an elaborate national poem on the war with Venice. But neither Maximilian nor the university of Vienna would lift a hand for him, and he passed into Italy, where, at Pavia, he sojourned throughout 1511 and part of 1512. In the latter year his studies were interrupted by war; in the siege of Pavia by papal troops and Swiss, he was plundered by both sides, and escaped, sick and penniless, to Bologna; on his recovery he even took service as a private soldier in the emperor’s army.

This dark period lasted no long time; in 1514 he was again in Germany, where, thanks to his poetic gifts and the friendship of Eitelwolf von Stein (d. 1515), he won the favour of the elector of Mainz, Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. Here high dreams of a learned career rose on him; Mainz should be made the metropolis of a grand Humanist movement, the centre of good style and literary form. But the murder in 1515 of his relative Hans von Hutten by Ulrich, duke of Württemberg, changed the whole course of his life; satire, chief refuge of the weak, became Hutten’s weapon; with one hand he took his part in the famousEpistolae obscurorum virorum, and with the other launched scathing letters, eloquent Ciceronian orations, or biting satires against the duke. Though the emperor was too lazy and indifferent to smite a great prince, he took Hutten under his protection and bestowed on him the honour of a laureate crown in 1517. Hutten, who had meanwhile revisited Italy, again attached himself to the electoral court at Mainz; and he was there when in 1518 his friend Pirckheimer wrote, urging him to abandon the court and dedicate himself to letters. We have the poet’s long reply, in an epistle on his “way of life,” an amusing mixture of earnestness and vanity, self-satisfaction and satire; he tells his friend that his career is just begun, that he has had twelve years of wandering, and will now enjoy himself a while in patriotic literary work; that he has by no means deserted the humaner studies, but carries with him a little library of standard books. Pirckheimer in his burgher life may have ease and even luxury; he, a knight of the empire, how can he condescend to obscurity? He must abide where he can shine.

In 1519 he issued in one volume his attacks on Duke Ulrich, and then, drawing sword, took part in the private war which overthrew that prince; in this affair he became intimate with Franz von Sickingen, the champion of the knightly order (Ritterstand). Hutten now warmly and openly espoused the Lutheran cause, but he was at the same time mixed up in the attempt of the “Ritterstand” to assert itself as the militia of the empire against the independence of the German princes. Soon after this time he discovered at Fulda a copy of the manifesto of the emperor Henry IV. against Hildebrand, and published it with comments as an attack on the papal claims over Germany. He hoped thereby to interest the new emperor Charles V., and the higher orders in the empire, in behalf of German liberties; but the appeal failed. What Luther had achieved by speaking to cities and common folk in homely phrase, because he touched heart and conscience, that the far finer weapons of Hutten failed to effect, because he tried to touch the more cultivated sympathies and dormant patriotism of princes and bishops, nobles and knights. And so he at once gained an undying name in the republic of letters and ruined his own career. He showed that the artificial verse-making of the Humanists could be connected with the new outburst of genuine German poetry. The Minnesinger was gone; the new national singer, a Luther or a Hans Sachs, was heralded by the stirring lines of Hutten’s pen. These have in them a splendid natural swing and ring, strong and patriotic, though unfortunately addressed to knight and landsknecht rather than to the German people.

The poet’s high dream of a knightly national regeneration had a rude awakening. The attack on the papacy, and Luther’s vast and sudden popularity, frightened Elector Albert, who dismissed Hutten from his court. Hoping for imperial favour, he betook himself to Charles V.; but that young prince would have none of him. So he returned to his friends, and they rejoiced greatly to see him still alive; for Pope Leo X. had ordered him to be arrested and sent to Rome, and assassins dogged his steps. He now attached himself more closely to Franz von Sickingen and the knightly movement. This also came to a disastrous end in the capture of the Ebernberg, and Sickingen’s death; the higher nobles had triumphed; the archbishops avenged themselves on Lutheranism as interpretedby the knightly order. With Sickingen Hutten also finally fell. He fled to Basel, where Erasmus refused to see him, both for fear of his loathsome diseases, and also because the beggared knight was sure to borrow money from him. A paper war consequently broke out between the two Humanists, which embittered Hutten’s last days, and stained the memory of Erasmus. From Basel Ulrich dragged himself to Mülhausen; and when the vengeance of Erasmus drove him thence, he went to Zurich. There the large heart of Zwingli welcomed him; he helped him with money, and found him a quiet refuge with the pastor of the little isle of Ufnau on the Zurich lake. There the frail and worn-out poet, writing swift satire to the end, died at the end of August or beginning of September 1523 at the age of thirty-five. He left behind him some debts due to compassionate friends; he did not even own a single book, and all his goods amounted to the clothes on his back, a bundle of letters, and that valiant pen which had fought so many a sharp battle, and had won for the poor knight-errant a sure place in the annals of literature.

Ulrich von Hutten is one of those men of genius at whom propriety is shocked, and whom the mean-spirited avoid. Yet through his short and buffeted life he was befriended, with wonderful charity and patience, by the chief leaders of the Humanist movement. For, in spite of his irritable vanity, his immoral life and habits, his odious diseases, his painful restlessness, Hutten had much in him that strong men could love. He passionately loved the truth, and was ever open to all good influences. He was a patriot, whose soul soared to ideal schemes and a grand utopian restoration of his country. In spite of all, his was a frank and noble nature; his faults chiefly the faults of genius ill-controlled, and of a life cast in the eventful changes of an age of novelty. A swarm of writings issued from his pen; at first the smooth elegance of his Latin prose and verse seemed strangely to miss his real character; he was the Cicero and Ovid of Germany before he became its Lucian.

His chief works were hisArs versificandi(1511); theNemo(1518); a work on theMorbus Gallicus(1519); the volume of Steckelberg complaints against Duke Ulrich (including his fourCiceronian Orations, his Letters and thePhalarismus) also in 1519; theVadismus(1520); and the controversy with Erasmus at the end of his life. Besides these were many admirable poems in Latin and German. It is not known with certainty how far Hutten was the parent of the celebratedEpistolae obscurorum virorum, that famous satire on monastic ignorance as represented by the theologians of Cologne with which the friends of Reuchlin defended him. At first the cloister-world, not discerning its irony, welcomed the work as a defence of their position; though their eyes were soon opened by the favour with which the learned world received it. TheEpistolaewere eagerly bought up; the first part (41 letters) appeared at the end of 1515; early in 1516 there was a second edition; later in 1516 a third, with an appendix of seven letters; in 1517 appeared the second part (62 letters), to which a fresh appendix of eight letters was subjoined soon after. In 1909 the Latin text of theEpistolaewith an English translation was published by F. G. Stokes. Hutten, in a letter addressed to Robert Crocus, denied that he was the author of the book, but there is no doubt as to his connexion with it. Erasmus was of opinion that there were three authors, of whom Crotus Rubianus was the originator of the idea, and Hutten a chief contributor. D. F. Strauss, who dedicates to the subject a chapter of his admirable work on Hutten, concludes that he had no share in the first part, but that his hand is clearly visible in the second part, which he attributes in the main to him. To him is due the more serious and severe tone of that bitter portion of the satire. See W. Brecht,Die Verfasser der Epistolae obscurorum virorum(1904).For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, see E. Böcking’sIndex Bibliographicus Huttenianus(1858). Böcking is also the editor of the complete edition of Hutten’s works (7 vols., 1859-1862). A selection of Hutten’s German writings, edited by G. Balke, appeared in 1891. Cp. S. Szamatolski,Huttens deutsche Schriften(1891). The best biography (though it is also somewhat of a political pamphlet) is that of D. F. Strauss (Ulrich von Hutten, 1857; 4th ed., 1878; English translation by G. Sturge, 1874), with which may be compared the older monographs by A. Wagenseil (1823), A. Bürck (1846) and J. Zeller (Paris, 1849). See also J. Deckert,Ulrich von Huttens Leben und Wirken. Eine historische Skizze(1901).

His chief works were hisArs versificandi(1511); theNemo(1518); a work on theMorbus Gallicus(1519); the volume of Steckelberg complaints against Duke Ulrich (including his fourCiceronian Orations, his Letters and thePhalarismus) also in 1519; theVadismus(1520); and the controversy with Erasmus at the end of his life. Besides these were many admirable poems in Latin and German. It is not known with certainty how far Hutten was the parent of the celebratedEpistolae obscurorum virorum, that famous satire on monastic ignorance as represented by the theologians of Cologne with which the friends of Reuchlin defended him. At first the cloister-world, not discerning its irony, welcomed the work as a defence of their position; though their eyes were soon opened by the favour with which the learned world received it. TheEpistolaewere eagerly bought up; the first part (41 letters) appeared at the end of 1515; early in 1516 there was a second edition; later in 1516 a third, with an appendix of seven letters; in 1517 appeared the second part (62 letters), to which a fresh appendix of eight letters was subjoined soon after. In 1909 the Latin text of theEpistolaewith an English translation was published by F. G. Stokes. Hutten, in a letter addressed to Robert Crocus, denied that he was the author of the book, but there is no doubt as to his connexion with it. Erasmus was of opinion that there were three authors, of whom Crotus Rubianus was the originator of the idea, and Hutten a chief contributor. D. F. Strauss, who dedicates to the subject a chapter of his admirable work on Hutten, concludes that he had no share in the first part, but that his hand is clearly visible in the second part, which he attributes in the main to him. To him is due the more serious and severe tone of that bitter portion of the satire. See W. Brecht,Die Verfasser der Epistolae obscurorum virorum(1904).

For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, see E. Böcking’sIndex Bibliographicus Huttenianus(1858). Böcking is also the editor of the complete edition of Hutten’s works (7 vols., 1859-1862). A selection of Hutten’s German writings, edited by G. Balke, appeared in 1891. Cp. S. Szamatolski,Huttens deutsche Schriften(1891). The best biography (though it is also somewhat of a political pamphlet) is that of D. F. Strauss (Ulrich von Hutten, 1857; 4th ed., 1878; English translation by G. Sturge, 1874), with which may be compared the older monographs by A. Wagenseil (1823), A. Bürck (1846) and J. Zeller (Paris, 1849). See also J. Deckert,Ulrich von Huttens Leben und Wirken. Eine historische Skizze(1901).

(G. W. K.)

HUTTER, LEONHARD(1563-1616), German Lutheran theologian, was born at Nellingen near Ulm in January 1563. From 1581 he studied at the universities of Strassburg, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Jena. In 1594 he began to give theological lectures at Jena, and in 1596 accepted a call as professor of theology at Wittenberg, where he died on the 23rd of October 1616. Hutter was a stern champion of Lutheran orthodoxy, as set down in the confessions and embodied in his ownCompendium locorum theologicorum(1610; reprinted 1863), being so faithful to his master as to win the title of “Luther redonatus.”

In reply to Rudolf Hospinian’sConcordia discors(1607), he wrote a work, rich in historical material but one-sided in its apologetics,Concordia concors(1614), defending the formula of Concord, which he regarded as inspired. HisIrenicum vere christianumis directed against David Pareus (1548-1622), professor primarius at Heidelberg, who inIrenicum sive de unione et synodo Evangelicorum(1614) had pleaded for a reconciliation of Lutheranism and Calvinism; hisCalvinista aulopoliticus(1610) was written against the “damnable Calvinism” which was becoming prevalent in Holstein and Brandenburg. Another work, based on the formula of Concord, was entitledLoci communes theologici.

In reply to Rudolf Hospinian’sConcordia discors(1607), he wrote a work, rich in historical material but one-sided in its apologetics,Concordia concors(1614), defending the formula of Concord, which he regarded as inspired. HisIrenicum vere christianumis directed against David Pareus (1548-1622), professor primarius at Heidelberg, who inIrenicum sive de unione et synodo Evangelicorum(1614) had pleaded for a reconciliation of Lutheranism and Calvinism; hisCalvinista aulopoliticus(1610) was written against the “damnable Calvinism” which was becoming prevalent in Holstein and Brandenburg. Another work, based on the formula of Concord, was entitledLoci communes theologici.

HUTTON, CHARLES(1737-1823), English mathematician, was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne on the 14th of August 1737. He was educated in a school at Jesmond, kept by Mr Ivison, a clergyman of the church of England. There is reason to believe, on the evidence of two pay-bills, that for a short time in 1755 and 1756 Hutton worked in Old Long Benton colliery; at any rate, on Ivison’s promotion to a living, Hutton succeeded to the Jesmond school, whence, in consequence of increasing pupils, he removed to Stote’s Hall. While he taught during the day at Stote’s Hall, he studied mathematics in the evening at a school in Newcastle. In 1760 he married, and began tuition on a larger scale in Newcastle, where he had among his pupils John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, chancellor of England. In 1764 he published his first work,The Schoolmaster’s Guide, or a Complete System of Practical Arithmetic, which in 1770 was followed by hisTreatise on Mensuration both in Theory and Practice. In 1772 appeared a tract onThe Principles of Bridges, suggested by the destruction of Newcastle bridge by a high flood on the 17th of November 1771. In 1773 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and in the following year he was elected F.R.S. and reported on Nevil Maskelyne’s determination of the mean density and mass of the earth from measurements taken in 1774-1776 at Mount Schiehallion in Perthshire. This account appeared in thePhilosophical Transactionsfor 1778, was afterwards reprinted in the second volume of hisTracts on Mathematical and Philosophical Subjects, and procured for Hutton the degree of LL.D. from the university of Edinburgh. He was elected foreign secretary to the Royal Society in 1779, but his resignation in 1783 was brought about by the president Sir Joseph Banks, whose behaviour to the mathematical section of the society was somewhat high-handed (see Kippis’sObservations on the late Contests in the Royal Society, London, 1784). After hisTables of the Products and Powers of Numbers, 1781, and hisMathematical Tables, 1785, he issued, for the use of the Royal Military Academy, in 1787Elements of Conic Sections, and in 1798 hisCourse of Mathematics. HisMathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, a valuable contribution to scientific biography, was published in 1795 (2nd ed., 1815), and the four volumes ofRecreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, mostly a translation from the French, in 1803. One of the most laborious of his works was the abridgment, in conjunction with G. Shaw and R. Pearson, of thePhilosophical Transactions. This undertaking, the mathematical and scientific parts of which fell to Hutton’s share, was completed in 1809, and filled eighteen volumes quarto. His name first appears in theLadies’ Diary(a poetical and mathematical almanac which was begun in 1704, and lasted till 1871) in 1764; ten years later he was appointed editor of the almanac, a post which he retained till 1817. Previously he had begun a small periodical,Miscellanea Mathematica, which extended only to thirteen numbers; subsequently he published in five volumesThe Diarian Miscellany, which contained large extracts from theDiary. He resigned his professorship in 1807, and died on the 27th of January 1823.

See John Bruce,Charles Hutton(Newcastle, 1823).

See John Bruce,Charles Hutton(Newcastle, 1823).

HUTTON, JAMES(1726-1797), Scottish geologist, was born in Edinburgh on the 3rd of June 1726. Educated at the high school and university of his native city, he acquired while a student a passionate love of scientific inquiry. He was apprenticed to a lawyer, but his employer advised that a more congenial profession should be chosen for him. The young apprentice chose medicine as being nearest akin to his favourite pursuit of chemistry. He studied for three years at Edinburgh, and completed his medical education in Paris, returning by the Low Countries, and taking his degree of doctor of medicine at Leiden in 1749. Finding, however, that there seemed hardly any opening for him, he abandoned the medical profession, and, having inherited a small property in Berwickshire from his father, resolved to devote himself to agriculture. He then went to Norfolk to learn the practical work of farming, and subsequently travelled in Holland, Belgium and the north of France. During these years he began to study the surface of the earth, gradually shaping in his mind the problem to which he afterwards devoted his energies. In the summer of 1754 he established himself on his own farm in Berwickshire, where he resided for fourteen years, and where he introduced the most improved forms of husbandry. As the farm was brought into excellent order, and as its management, becoming more easy, grew less interesting, he was induced to let it, and establish himself for the rest of his life in Edinburgh. This took place about the year 1768. He was unmarried, and from this period until his death in 1797 he lived with his three sisters. Surrounded by congenial literary and scientific friends he devoted himself to research.

At that time geology in any proper sense of the term did not exist. Mineralogy, however, had made considerable progress. But Hutton had conceived larger ideas than were entertained by the mineralogists of his day. He desired to trace back the origin of the various minerals and rocks, and thus to arrive at some clear understanding of the history of the earth. For many years he continued to study the subject. At last, in the spring of the year 1785, he communicated his views to the recently established Royal Society of Edinburgh in a paper entitledTheory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe. In this remarkable work the doctrine is expounded that geology is not cosmogony, but must confine itself to the study of the materials of the earth; that everywhere evidence may be seen that the present rocks of the earth’s surface have been in great part formed out of the waste of older rocks; that these materials having been laid down under the sea were there consolidated under great pressure, and were subsequently disrupted and upheaved by the expansive power of subterranean heat; that during these convulsions veins and masses of molten rock were injected into the rents of the dislocated strata; that every portion of the upraised land, as soon as exposed to the atmosphere, is subject to decay; and that this decay must tend to advance until the whole of the land has been worn away and laid down on the sea-floor, whence future upheavals will once more raise the consolidated sediments into new land. In some of these broad and bold generalizations Hutton was anticipated by the Italian geologists; but to him belongs the credit of having first perceived their mutual relations, and combined them in a luminous coherent theory based upon observation.

It was not merely the earth to which Hutton directed his attention. He had long studied the changes of the atmosphere. The same volume in which hisTheory of the Earthappeared contained also aTheory of Rain, which was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784. He contended that the amount of moisture which the air can retain in solution increases with augmentation of temperature, and, therefore, that on the mixture of two masses of air of different temperatures a portion of the moisture must be condensed and appear in visible form. He investigated the available data regarding rainfall and climate in different regions of the globe, and came to the conclusion that the rainfall is everywhere regulated by the humidity of the air on the one hand, and the causes which promote mixtures of different aerial currents in the higher atmosphere on the other.

The vigour and versatility of his genius may be understood from the variety of works which, during his thirty years’ residence in Edinburgh, he gave to the world. In 1792 he published a quarto volume entitledDissertations on different Subjects in Natural Philosophy, in which he discussed the nature of matter, fluidity, cohesion, light, heat and electricity. Some of these subjects were further illustrated by him in papers read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He did not restrain himself within the domain of physics, but boldly marched into that of metaphysics, publishing three quarto volumes with the titleAn Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason—from Sense to Science and Philosophy. In this work he developed the idea that the external world, as conceived by us, is the creation of our own minds influenced by impressions from without, that there is no resemblance between our picture of the outer world and the reality, yet that the impressions produced upon our minds, being constant and consistent, become as much realities to us as if they precisely resembled things actually existing, and, therefore, that our moral conduct must remain the same as if our ideas perfectly corresponded to the causes producing them. His closing years were devoted to the extension and republication of hisTheory of the Earth, of which two volumes appeared in 1795. A third volume, necessary to complete the work, was left by him in manuscript, and is referred to by his biographer John Playfair. A portion of the MS. of this volume, which had been given to the Geological Society of London by Leonard Horner, was published by the Society in 1899, under the editorship of Sir A. Geikie. The rest of the manuscript appears to be lost. Soon afterwards Hutton set to work to collect and systematize his numerous writings on husbandry, which he proposed to publish under the title ofElements of Agriculture. He had nearly completed this labour when an incurable disease brought his active career to a close on the 26th of March 1797.

It is by hisTheory of the Earththat Hutton will be remembered with reverence while geology continues to be cultivated. The author’s style, however, being somewhat heavy and obscure, the book did not attract during his lifetime so much attention as it deserved. Happily for science Hutton numbered among his friends John Playfair (q.v.), professor of mathematics in the university of Edinburgh, whose enthusiasm for the spread of Hutton’s doctrine was combined with a rare gift of graceful and luminous exposition. Five years after Hutton’s death he published a volume,Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, in which he gave an admirable summary of that theory, with numerous additional illustrations and arguments. This work is justly regarded as one of the classical contributions to geological literature. To its influence much of the sound progress of British geology must be ascribed. In the year 1805 a biographical account of Hutton, written by Playfair, was published in vol. v. of theTransactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

It is by hisTheory of the Earththat Hutton will be remembered with reverence while geology continues to be cultivated. The author’s style, however, being somewhat heavy and obscure, the book did not attract during his lifetime so much attention as it deserved. Happily for science Hutton numbered among his friends John Playfair (q.v.), professor of mathematics in the university of Edinburgh, whose enthusiasm for the spread of Hutton’s doctrine was combined with a rare gift of graceful and luminous exposition. Five years after Hutton’s death he published a volume,Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, in which he gave an admirable summary of that theory, with numerous additional illustrations and arguments. This work is justly regarded as one of the classical contributions to geological literature. To its influence much of the sound progress of British geology must be ascribed. In the year 1805 a biographical account of Hutton, written by Playfair, was published in vol. v. of theTransactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

(A. Ge.)

HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT(1826-1897), English writer and theologian, son of Joseph Hutton, Unitarian minister at Leeds, was born at Leeds on the 2nd of June 1826. His family removed to London in 1835, and he was educated at University College School and University College, where he began a lifelong friendship with Walter Bagehot, of whose works he afterwards was the editor; he took the degree in 1845, being awarded the gold medal for philosophy. Meanwhile he had also studied for short periods at Heidelberg and Berlin, and in 1847 he entered Manchester New College with the idea of becoming a minister like his father, and studied there under James Martineau. He did not, however, succeed in obtaining a call to any church, and for some little time his future was unsettled. He married in 1851 his cousin, Anne Roscoe, and became joint-editor with J. L. Sanford of theInquirer, the principal Unitarian organ. But his innovations and his unconventional views about stereotyped Unitarian doctrines caused alarm, and in 1853 he resigned. His health had broken down, and he visited the West Indies, where his wife died of yellow fever. In 1855 Hutton and Bagehot became joint-editors of theNational Review, a new monthly, and conducted it for ten years. During this time Hutton’s theological views, influenced largely by Coleridge, and moredirectly by F. W. Robertson and F. D. Maurice, gradually approached more and more to those of the Church of England, which he ultimately joined. His interest in theology was profound, and he brought to it a spirituality of outlook and an aptitude for metaphysical inquiry and exposition which added a singular attraction to his writings. In 1861 he joined Meredith Townsend as joint-editor and part proprietor of theSpectator, then a well-known liberal weekly, which, however, was not remunerative from the business point of view. Hutton took charge of the literary side of the paper, and by degrees his own articles became and remained up to the last one of the best-known features of serious and thoughtful English journalism. TheSpectator, which gradually became a prosperous property, was his pulpit, in which unwearyingly he gave expression to his views, particularly on literary, religious and philosophical subjects, in opposition to the agnostic and rationalistic opinions then current in intellectual circles, as popularized by Huxley. A man of fearless honesty, quick and catholic sympathies, broad culture, and many friends in intellectual and religious circles, he became one of the most influential journalists of the day, his fine character and conscience earning universal respect and confidence. He was an original member of the Metaphysical Society (1869). He was an anti-vivisectionist, and a member of the royal commission (1875) on that subject. In 1858 he had married Eliza Roscoe, a cousin of his first wife; she died early in 1897, and Hutton’s own death followed on the 9th of September of the same year.

Among his other publications may be mentionedEssays, Theological and Literary(1871; revised 1888), andCriticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers(1894); and his opinions may be studied compendiously in the selections from hisSpectatorarticles published in 1899 under the title ofAspects of Religious and Scientific Thought.

Among his other publications may be mentionedEssays, Theological and Literary(1871; revised 1888), andCriticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers(1894); and his opinions may be studied compendiously in the selections from hisSpectatorarticles published in 1899 under the title ofAspects of Religious and Scientific Thought.

HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY(1825-1895), English biologist, was born on the 4th of May 1825 at Ealing, where his father, George Huxley, was senior assistant-master in the school of Dr Nicholas. This was an establishment of repute, and is at any rate remarkable for having produced two men with so little in common in after life as Huxley and Cardinal Newman. The cardinal’s brother, Francis William, had been “captain” of the school in 1821. Huxley was a seventh child (as his father had also been), and the youngest who survived infancy. Of Huxley’s ancestry no more is ascertainable than in the case of most middle-class families. He himself thought it sprang from the Cheshire Huxleys of Huxley Hall. Different branches migrated south, one, now extinct, reaching London, where its members were apparently engaged in commerce. They established themselves for four generations at Wyre Hall, near Edmonton, and one was knighted by Charles II. Huxley describes his paternal race as “mainly Iberian mongrels, with a good dash of Norman and a little Saxon.”1From his father he thought he derived little except a quick temper and the artistic faculty which proved of great service to him and reappeared in an even more striking degree in his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Collier. “Mentally and physically,” he wrote, “I am a piece of my mother.” Her maiden name was Rachel Withers. “She came of Wiltshire people,” he adds, and describes her as “a typical example of the Iberian variety.” He tells us that “her most distinguishing characteristic was rapidity of thought.... That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength” (Essays, i. 4). One of the not least striking facts in Huxley’s life is that of education in the formal sense he received none. “I had 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” (Life, ii. 145). After the death of Dr Nicholas the Ealing school broke up, and Huxley’s father returned about 1835 to his native town, Coventry, where he had obtained a small appointment. Huxley was left to his own devices; few histories of boyhood could offer any parallel. At twelve he was sitting up in bed to read Hutton’sGeology. His great desire was to be a mechanical engineer; it ended in his devotion to “the mechanical engineering of living machines.” His curiosity in this direction was nearly fatal; apost-mortemhe was taken to between thirteen and fourteen was followed by an illness which seems to have been the starting-point of the ill-health which pursued him all through life. At fifteen he devoured Sir William Hamilton’sLogic, and thus acquired the taste for metaphysics, which he cultivated to the end. At seventeen he came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Fifty years later he wrote: “To make things clear and get rid of cant and shows of all sorts. This was the lesson I learnt from Carlyle’s books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life” (Life, ii. 268). Incidentally they led him to begin to learn German; he had already acquired French. At seventeen Huxley, with his elder brother James, commenced regular medical studies at Charing Cross Hospital, where they had both obtained scholarships. He studied under Wharton Jones, a physiologist who never seems to have attained the reputation he deserved. Huxley said of him: “I do not know that I ever felt so much respect for a teacher before or since” (Life, i. 20). At twenty he passed his first M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology; W. H. Ransom, the well-known Nottingham physician, obtaining the exhibition. In 1845 he published, at the suggestion of Wharton Jones, his first scientific paper, demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognized layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as “Huxley’s layer.”

Something had to be done for a livelihood, and at the suggestion of a fellow-student, Mr (afterwards Sir Joseph) Fayrer, he applied for an appointment in the navy. He passed the necessary examination, and at the same time obtained the qualification of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was “entered on the books of Nelson’s old ship, the ‘Victory,’ for duty at Haslar Hospital.” Its chief, Sir John Richardson, who was a well-known Arctic explorer and naturalist, recognized Huxley’s ability, and procured for him the post of surgeon to H.M.S. “Rattlesnake,” about to start for surveying work in Torres Strait. The commander, Captain Owen Stanley, was a son of the bishop of Norwich and brother of Dean Stanley, and wished for an officer with some scientific knowledge. Besides Huxley the “Rattlesnake” also carried a naturalist by profession, John Macgillivray, who, however, beyond a dull narrative of the expedition, accomplished nothing. The “Rattlesnake” left England on the 3rd of December 1846, and was ordered home after the lamented death of Captain Stanley at Sydney, to be paid off at Chatham on the 9th of November 1850. The tropical seas teem with delicate surface-life, and to the study of this Huxley devoted himself with unremitting devotion. At that time no known methods existed by which it could be preserved for study in museums at home. He gathered a magnificent harvest in the almost unreaped field, and the conclusions he drew from it were the beginning of the revolution in zoological science which he lived to see accomplished.

Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), whose classification still held its ground, had divided the animal kingdom into four greatembranchements. Each of these corresponded to an independent archetype, of which the “idea” had existed in the mind of the Creator. There was no other connexion between these classes, and the “ideas” which animated them were, as far as one can see, arbitrary. Cuvier’s groups, without their theoretical basis, were accepted by K. E. von Baer (1792-1876). The “idea” of the group, or archetype, admitted of endless variation within it; but this was subordinate to essential conformity with the archetype, and hence Cuvier deduced the important principle of the “correlation of parts,” of which he made such conspicuous use in palaeontological reconstruction. Meanwhile the “Naturphilosophen,” with J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) and L. Oken (1779-1851), had in effect grasped the underlying principle of correlation, and so far anticipated evolution by asserting the possibility of deriving specialized from simpler structures. Though they were still hampered by idealistic conceptions, they established morphology. Cuvier’s four great groups were Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata and Radiata.It was amongst the members of the last class that Huxley found most material ready to his hand in the seas of the tropics. It included organisms of the most varied kind, with nothing more in common than that their parts were more or less distributed round a centre. Huxley sent home “communication after communication to the Linnean Society,” then a somewhat somnolent body, “with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of the ark” (Essays, i. 13). His important paper,On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae, met with a better fate. It was communicated by the bishop of Norwich to the Royal Society, and printed by it in thePhilosophical Transactionsin 1849. Huxley united, with the Medusae, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. This alone was no inconsiderable feat for a young surgeon who had only had the training of the medical school. But the ground on which it was done has led to far-reaching theoretical developments. Huxley realized that something more than superficial characters were necessary in determining the affinities of animal organisms. He found that all the members of the class consisted of two membranes enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of what are now called the Coelenterata. All animals higher than these have been termed Coelomata; they possess a distinct body-cavity in addition to the stomach. Huxley went further than this, and the most profound suggestion in his paper is the comparison of the two layers with those which appear in the germ of the higher animals. The consequences which have flowed from this prophetic generalization of theectodermandendodermare familiar to every student of evolution. The conclusion was the more remarkable as at the time he was not merely free from any evolutionary belief, but actually rejected it. The value of Huxley’s work was immediately recognized. On returning to England in 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not merely received the Royal medal, but was elected on the council. With absolutely no aid from any one he had placed himself in the front rank of English scientific men. He secured the friendship of Sir J. D. Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, in order that he might work up the observations he had made during the voyage of the “Rattlesnake.” He was thus enabled to produce various important memoirs, especially those on certain Ascidians, in which he solved the problem ofAppendicularia—an organism whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign—and on the morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca.

Richard Owen, then the leading comparative anatomist in Great Britain, was a disciple of Cuvier, and adopted largely from him the deductive explanation of anatomical fact from idealistic conceptions. He superadded the evolutionary theories of Oken, which were equally idealistic, but were altogether repugnant to Cuvier. Huxley would have none of either. Imbued with the methods of von Baer and Johannes Müller, his methods were purely inductive. He would not hazard any statement beyond what the facts revealed. He retained, however, as has been done by his successors, the use of archetypes, though they no longer represented fundamental “ideas” but generalizations of the essential points of structure common to the individuals of each class. He had not wholly freed himself, however, from archetypal trammels. “The doctrine,” he says, “that every natural group is organized after a definite archetype ... seems to me as important for zoology as the doctrine of definite proportions for chemistry.” This was in 1853. He further stated: “There is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete evolution of one type” (Phil. Trans., 1853, p. 63). As Chalmers Mitchell points out, this statement is of great historical interest. Huxley definitely uses the word “evolution,” and admits its existencewithinthe great groups. He had not, however, rid himself of the notion that the archetype was a property inherent in the group. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance he made in 1852, was unable to convert him to evolution in its widest sense (Life, i. 168). He could not bring himself to acceptance of the theory—owing, no doubt, to his rooted aversion from à priori reasoning—without a mechanical conception of its mode of operation. In his first interview with Darwin, which seems to have been about the same time, he expressed his belief “in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups,” and was received with a humorous smile (Life, i. 169).

The naval medical service exists for practical purposes. It is not surprising, therefore, that after his three years’ nominal employment Huxley was ordered on active service. Though without private means of any kind, he resigned. The navy, however, retains the credit of having started his scientific career as well as that of Hooker and Darwin. Huxley was now thrown on his own resources, the immediate prospects of which were slender enough. As a matter of fact, he had not to wait many months. His friend, Edward Forbes, was appointed to the chair of natural history in Edinburgh, and in July 1854 he succeeded him as lecturer at the School of Mines and as naturalist to the Geological Survey in the following year. The latter post he hesitated at first to accept, as he “did not care for fossils” (Essays, i. 15). In 1855 he married Miss H. A. Heathorn, whose acquaintance he had made in Sydney. They were engaged when Huxley could offer nothing but the future promise of his ability. The confidence of his devoted helpmate was not misplaced, and her affection sustained him to the end, after she had seen him the recipient of every honour which English science could bestow. His most important research belonging to this period was the Croonian Lecture delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on “The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull.” In this he completely and finally demolished, by applying as before the inductive method, the idealistic, if in some degree evolutionary, views of its origin which Owen had derived from Goethe and Oken. This finally disposed of the “archetype,” and may be said once for all to have liberated the English anatomical school from the deductive method.

In 1859The Origin of Specieswas published. This was a momentous event in the history of science, and not least for Huxley. Hitherto he had turned a deaf ear to evolution. “I took my stand,” he says, “upon two grounds: firstly, that ... the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena” (Life, i. 168). Huxley had studied Lamarck “attentively,” but to no purpose. Sir Charles Lyell “was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world” (l.c.); and Huxley found in Darwin what he had failed to find in Lamarck, an intelligible hypothesis good enough as a working basis. Yet with the transparent candour which was characteristic of him, he never to the end of his life concealed the fact that he thought it wanting in rigorous proof. Darwin, however, was a naturalist; Huxley was not. He says: “I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species-work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business” (Essays, i. 7). But the solution of the problem of organic evolution must work upwards from the initial stages, and it is precisely for the study of these that “species-work” is necessary. Darwin, by observing the peculiarities in the distribution of the plants which he had collected in the Galapagos, was started on the path that led to his theory. Anatomical research had only so far led to transcendental hypothesis, though in Huxley’s hands it had cleared the decks of that lumber. He quotes with approval Darwin’s remark that “no one has a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (Essays, ii. 283). The rigorous proof which Huxley demanded was the production of species sterile to one another by selective breeding (Life, i. 193). But this was a misconception of the question. Sterility is a physiological character, and the specific differences which the theory undertook to account for aremorphological; there is no necessary nexus between the two. Huxley, however, felt that he had at last a secure grip of evolution. He warned Darwin: “I will stop at no point as long as clear reasoning will carry me further” (Life, i. 172). Owen, who had some evolutionary tendencies, was at first favourably disposed to Darwin’s theory, and even claimed that he had to some extent anticipated it in his own writings. But Darwin, though he did not thrust it into the foreground, never flinched from recognizing that man could not be excluded from his theory. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (Origin, ed. i. 488). Owen could not face the wrath of fashionable orthodoxy. In his Rede Lecture he endeavoured to save the position by asserting that man was clearly marked off from all other animals by the anatomical structure of his brain. This was actually inconsistent with known facts, and was effectually refuted by Huxley in various papers and lectures, summed up in 1863 inMan’s Place in Nature. This “monkey damnification” of mankind was too much even for the “veracity” of Carlyle, who is said to have never forgiven it. Huxley had not the smallest respect for authority as a basis for belief, scientific or otherwise. He held that scientific men were morally bound “to try all things and hold fast to that which is good” (Life, ii. 161). Called upon in 1862, in the absence of the president, to deliver the presidential address to the Geological Society, he disposed once for all of one of the principles accepted by geologists, that similar fossils in distinct regions indicated that the strata containing them were contemporary. All that could be concluded, he pointed out, was that the general order of succession was the same. In 1854 Huxley had refused the post of palaeontologist to the Geological Survey; but the fossils for which he then said that he “did not care” soon acquired importance in his eyes, as supplying evidence for the support of the evolutionary theory. The thirty-one years during which he occupied the chair of natural history at the School of Mines were largely occupied with palaeontological research. Numerous memoirs on fossil fishes established many far-reaching morphological facts. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating, in the course of lectures on birds, delivered at the College of Surgeons in 1867, the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the title of Sauropsida. An incidental result of the same course was his proposed rearrangement of the zoological regions into which P. L. Sclater had divided the world in 1857. Huxley anticipated, to a large extent, the results at which botanists have since arrived: he proposed as primary divisions, Arctogaea—to include the land areas of the northern hemisphere—and Notogaea for the remainder. Successive waves of life originated in and spread from the northern area, the survivors of the more ancient types finding successively a refuge in the south. Though Huxley had accepted the Darwinian theory as a working hypothesis, he never succeeded in firmly grasping it in detail. He thought “evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species” (Essays, v. 41). His palaeontological researches ultimately led him to dispense with Darwin. In 1892 he wrote: “The doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalization of certain facts ... classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology” (Essays, v. 42). Earlier in 1881 he had asserted even more emphatically that if the hypothesis of evolution “had not existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it” (Essays, iv. 44).

From 1870 onwards he was more and more drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. Some men yield the more readily to such demands, as their fulfilment is not unaccompanied by public esteem. But he felt, as he himself said of Joseph Priestley, “that he was a man and a citizen before he was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are at least as imperative as those of the latter” (Essays, iii. 13). From 1862 to 1884 he served on no less than ten Royal Commissions, dealing in every case with subjects of great importance, and in many with matters of the gravest moment to the community. He held and filled with invariable dignity and distinction more public positions than have perhaps ever fallen to the lot of a scientific man in England. From 1871 to 1880 he was a secretary of the Royal Society. From 1881 to 1885 he was president. For honours he cared little, though they were within his reach; it is said that he might have received a peerage. He accepted, however, in 1892, a Privy Councillorship, at once the most democratic and the most aristocratic honour accessible to an English citizen. In 1870 he was president of the British Association at Liverpool, and in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He resigned the latter position in 1872, but in the brief period during which he acted, probably more than any man, he left his mark on the foundations of national elementary education. He made war on the scholastic methods which wearied the mind in merely taxing the memory; the children were to be prepared to take their place worthily in the community. Physical training was the basis; domestic economy, at any rate for girls, was insisted upon, and for all some development of the aesthetic sense by means of drawing and singing. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the indispensable tools for acquiring knowledge, and intellectual discipline was to be gained through the rudiments of physical science. He insisted on the teaching of the Bible partly as a great literary heritage, partly because he was “seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion in these matters, without its use” (Essays, iii. 397). In 1872 the School of Mines was moved to South Kensington, and Huxley had, for the first time after eighteen years, those appliances for teaching beyond the lecture room, which to the lasting injury of the interests of biological science in Great Britain had been withheld from him by the short-sightedness of government. Huxley had only been able to bring his influence to bear upon his pupils by oral teaching, and had had no opportunity by personal intercourse in the laboratory of forming a school. He was now able to organize a system of instruction for classes of elementary teachers in the general principles of biology, which indirectly affected the teaching of the subject throughout the country.

The first symptoms of physical failure to meet the strain of the scientific and public duties demanded of him made some rest imperative, and he took a long holiday in Egypt. He still continued for some years to occupy himself mainly with vertebrate morphology. But he seemed to find more interest and the necessary mental stimulus to exertion in lectures, public addresses and more or less controversial writings. His health, which had for a time been fairly restored, completely broke down again in 1885. In 1890 he removed from London to Eastbourne, where after a painful illness he died on the 29th of June 1895.


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