that any portents preceded my arrival in this world; but in my childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value.  The windows of my mother’s room were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather.  For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash.  If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and State.  But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man’s prospects of advancement.

The fact that he received the name of the doubting apostle was by no means one of those superhuman coincidences in which some naive people see portents.  In later years my father used to make humorous play with its appropriateness, but in plain fact he was named after his grandfather, Thomas Huxley.  I have not traced the origin of the Henry.

Both parents were of dark complexion, and all the children were dark-haired and dark-eyed.  The father was tall, and, I believe, well set-up:  a miniature shows him with abundant, brown, curling hair brushed high above a good forehead, giving the effect, so fashionable in 1830, of a high-peaked head.  The features are well cut and regular; the nose rather long and inclined to be aquiline; the cheeks well covered; the eyes, under somewhat arched brows, expressive and interesting.  Outwardly, there is a certain resemblance traceable between the miniature and a daguerrotype of Huxley at nineteen; but the debt, physical and mental, owed to either parent is thus recorded:—­

Physically, I am the son of my mother so completely—­even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them—­that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately in my case, has never been cultivated; a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman’s head.  With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity.  Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought.  If one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at