HARDY, Alistair (his copy); HUXLEY, Julian

Essays of a Biologist [WITH:] manuscript memoir of Huxley, by Alistair Hardy

(Chatto and Windus, London, 1926)

8vo, 130 x 188mm; xiv, [2], 311. Third edition (first 1923). 3 loose sheets laid in, largest 204 x 260mm.

Alister Hardy's copy of Huxley's Essays, signed by him to the front endpaper, and with two related documents laid in. The first is a printed poem by Huxley, cut from a newspaper or journal, signed and inscribed 'for ACH' and dated, probably by Hardy: '1974!'. The poem is titled 'Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in Ely Cathedral'.

The second is a two page manuscript memoir of Julian Huxley written by Hardy, possibly a speech at or around the time of Huxley's death in 1975. Hardy gives an outline of Huxley's career and interests, reminisces about his own work with JH, and concludes by calling him "one of the liveliest minds I have ever met".

Hardy has also made a few pencil marks to the volume, in the essay 'Religion and Science'.

As he writes in the manuscript memoir here, Hardy 'was one of a small group of students who came up to Oxford to read Zoology just after teh first word war'. Hardy was a multi-faceted scientist and thinker. His formative experiences were on board the Discovery in the Antarctic in the 1920s. He became one of the world's leading marine biologists and invented the Continuous Plankton Recorder, which has resulted in one of the largest ecological data-sets ever compiled.

But – as indicated in the marginal marks here – he was also deeply interested in religious experience. In 1969 he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit in Manchester College, Oxford, which continues gathering information on religious experience to this day.

Like Julian Huxley he was a man of both cultures – Huxley was an ertswhile poet and supporter of the arts, and Hardy was himself a talented artist.

These and other subjects are dealt with in Hardy's short memoir of Huxley – which is perhaps most revealing on the evolution of zoology itself:

Up to this time our subject had been largely concerned with the anatomy of dead aninmals. We of the new generation were rebelling against this – we wanted to study living animals and the way they worked. Huxley was in the forefront of this new movement. He gave his first course of lectures at Oxford in what was then called Experimental Zoology. He carried us over the whole range of biology and beyond – into philosophy.

The volume is in good condition; light wear to the spine; loose sheets with flattened folds, now unfolded and kept separate from the volume; slight age-toning to the poem, edge-wear to the manuscript memoir (which is written on the verso of two reading lists for a course in Marine Biology).