"If a man," he wrote, "cannot get literary culture out of his
Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and
Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I
say, if he cannot get it out of these writers, he cannot get it out of
anything." He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the original,
and a very wide acquaintance with Greek phrasing and Greek ideas
derived from a study of Greek authors in English versions. He had an
unusual knowledge of Latin, both of the classical writers and of the
early Church fathers and mediaeval writers on science and metaphysics.
French and German, the two foreign languages which are a necessary
part of the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of science,
were familiar to him. Finally, he had of necessity the wide and varied
vocabulary of the natural and technical sciences at his disposal. From
these varied sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the raw
material for expressing ideas, very much greater and more varied than
that in the possession of most writers. You will find in his writings
abundant and omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal
material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth: a Greek phrase, a
German phrase, a Latin or French phrase, or a group of words borrowed
from one of our own great writers always seemed to await his wish.
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