Bulldog Pup

T. H. HUXLEY'S DIARY OF THE VOYAGE or H. M. S. RATTLESNAKE--edited by Julian Huxley--Doitbleday, Doran ($3).

Today Thomas Henry Huxley may be remembered chiefly as Aldous' grandfather, but when he was his grandson's age he had a resounding fame of his own.

Generally credited with having done more to popularize the doctrine of Evolution than any other man, Huxley was not a scientist of Darwin's stature, was well content to dub himself "Darwin's bulldog." He had other claims to renown. In biology and paleontology he became one of the foremost groundbreakers of his day.

And though not the first agnostic who ever lived, he was the first to call himself so.

When Huxley's son wrote his distinguished father's official Life and Letters, he thought he had winnowed all the posthumous grain from the stack of his father's papers, but apparently he overlooked a youthful diary. Grandson Julian, also a biologist, found it after his father's death, last week published it with an introduction and notes. Huxley's Diary of the Voyage oj H. M. S. Rattlesnake, like Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of H. M. S.

Beagle, told what a young scientist thinks about on the threshold of his career. But Huxley's diary, unlike Darwin's, was not preoccupied by scientific fact nor visited by intimations of a great theory. A young medico of wide interests, with a keen eye and a susceptible heart, he wrote surprisingly little about his first big research job.

refreshingly much about his companions, the things and people he saw.

Huxley sailed from England in 1846 as assistant medical officer aboard H. M. S.

Rattlesnake, a 28-gun warship with a crew of 180 officers and men, on a cruise to Australia and the islands of New Guinea and the Louisiade. Huxley was just 21,

and it was four years before he saw England again. Besides his job as ship's doctor he had the un-naval post of naturalist, and intended to keep a weather eye out for Mollusca, Acalephae, Cirripedia, epizoa, Radiata and such. He rigged up a home-made tow-net to snare his specimens, soon ran afoul of the navigation officers, who complained that the net slowed the ship's way, took to dumping his catch overboard when his back was turned. As the long voyage wore on, Huxley found that such setbacks, like the difficulty of peering through his microscope in heavy weather or keeping a workable laboratory in a corner of the chartroom, were as nothing, compared to the psychological chafing brought about by close quarters.

All the officers suffered from this mental scurvy at times, but Huxley and the ship's clerk (whom, in good Victorianese, he calls "M.") developed a real feud. The quarrel was finally settled when Huxley insisted on a showdown before the captain, disproved all M.'s chimerical innuendoes, forced him to sign a retraction. In Australia, where the Rattlesnake based for several exploratory cruises, Huxley found pleasanter society, fell in love with a Miss Henrietta Heathorn, and diarized about her at a great rate. They were engaged eight years, finally married in England.

Grandson Julian prints a sample of Henrietta's journal, which is remarkable only for its extreme propriety and in the light of the fact that she afterwards became as sturdy an old agnostic as Huxley himself.

Partly because he had to be away so much from Henrietta and partly because he got no news of the scientific reports he sent home, Huxley got very tired of the Rattlesnake's devious cruising. A few brushes with the natives, the rescue of a Scotswoman who had been the sole survivor of a shipwreck on a savage island, were high spots in a dreary succession of days. He wrote: "If this is surveying, if this is the process of English Discovery, God defend me from any such elaborate waste of time and opportunity." Though he had left his Henrietta in Australia, when at last the Rattlesnake's barnacled hull wallowed past Land's End, Huxley was glad to be getting home.

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