DEATH OF MRS. HUXLEY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 118, 20 May 1914, Page 4

DEATH OF MRS. HUXLEY

HER LIFE IN AUSTRALIA. (PROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) LONDON, 9th April. The death has just taken place of Mrs. Thomas Henry Huxley, widow of the great zoologist and scientist. The daughter of Henry Heathorn, of Maidstone, she was born in 1825, and thus lived" to the rip© age of eighty-nine. Kate Heathorn, her aunt, to whom Mrs. Huxley owed much as a child, was well on in "her hundred and fifth year when she died in 1890. Under the affectionate care of this aunt the child often stayed while her father pursued elusive fortunes •in new ventures. She spent two happy years at school at Neuwied-on-the-Rhine, and then, in 1843, at the age of eighteen, she and her mother and half-sister took the long voyage to Australia to join her father, who had established a brewery andi a sawmill some ninety miles from Sydney. Next year her half-sister Oriana, marrying William Fanning, a Sydney merchant, she paid them a visit which lengthened to five years, managing .the household on Cook's River for her isister, an experience once variegated by a visit from bushrangers. It was after the Farmings • returned to England that there came the discovery of the Australian goldfields, and Miss Heathorn . was one of' the first women to visit tho mining camp at Bathurst. . At Sydney in 1847 she met and became engaged to Thomas Henry Huxley, also twenty-two years of age, then as-sistant-surgeon and zoologist on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which had been sent to survey the coasts of Australia, Louisiade Archipelago, and New Guinea. " Though at last crowned with a wonderfully close and happy union of forty years, the engagement was a long trial of faith and patience," writes a correspondent. "It lasted nearly eight years. 1 At first came separations, caused by the successive exploring voyages of the Rattlesnake,' on one of which the young surgeon was only kept back- by his captain's orders from joining Kennedy's ill-fated expedition through the bush lo Cape 1 York. Then, when the ship sailed home, a longer separation of four years and a-half ensued. Letters in those days took from four to six months on the way. They told how tho young investigator leaped at once into the front ranks of science and was elected F.R.S. at the age of twenty-seven ; but could find no permanent post to marry on, either at home or in the colonies. But her faith in him, her sympathy with his ideals, fortified him against tho thought of renouncing tho. unequal struggle and betaking himself to commpi'ce and material competence. Hope long deferred was realised in 1855. On her return to England with her parents she found that Huxley had been elected to _a professorship at the Royal School of Mines. But it seemed as if, after all, tho reunion was to end in tragedy. She had been very ill in Australia. In tho Life of Huxley it is told how he took her to one of tho most famous doctors of tho clay, as -if merely a patient ho was inteiestcd in. Then, as one member of the profession to another, ho asked him privately his opinion of the case. ' I give her six mouths to live,' said -' Well, six mouths or

not,' replied Huxley, ' sho is going to be my wife.' " The tough constitution of the Heathorns prevailed, however, and for forty years she was to her husband a second self.