ABSTRACT
It is a more grateful task to praise Mr. Huxley than not to praise him. For our sakes he has ransacked the ages and despoiled the climes; he has made us familiar with the figures and fashions of several centuries, including our own; he has provided us with ancient and modern jokes, in every style and suited to every taste. He has recovered that sense of the exciting strangeness, the decorative quality of scientific phenomena which has been so rare since the Elizabethans. If only for fear of the censure of specialists or pedants, few writers of the present day would dare to be so heroically encyclopaedic, such ardent gleaners of the gossip and table-talk-as well as the profounder reveries-of literature, history, science and religion.
