there is a marked difference in firmness of structure between the
earlier essays, such as On the Educational Value of the Natural History
Sciences, written, as Huxley acknowledges, in great haste, and the
later essays, such as A Liberal Education and The Method of Scientific
Investigation. To trace and to define this difference will be most
helpful to the student who is building up a knowledge of structure for
his own use.

According to Huxley's biographer in the Life and Letters of Thomas Henry
Huxley, the essays which represent him at his best are those published
in 1868. They are A Piece of Chalk, A Liberal Education, and On the
Physical Basis of Life. In connection with the comment on these essays
is the following quotation which gives one interesting information as to
Huxley's method of obtaining a clear style:--

This lecture on A Piece of Chalk together with two others delivered this
year, seems to me to mark the maturing of his style into that mastery of
clear expression for which he deliberately labored, the saying exactly
what he meant, neither too much nor too little, without confusion and
without obscurity. Have something to say, and say it, was the Duke of
Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which has to be
said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each
word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly
wrong, you will run up against a fact sometime and get set right. If you
shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will
give a loophole of escape either way, there is no hope for you.

This was the secret of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism
on style find a better illustration, Le style c'est l'homme meme. In
him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and