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intelligibility by the measure of our bodily size and earthly time, but sufficiently far away to inspire maximal awe.
    Moreover, we can bring this largest knowable scale further into the circle of our comprehension by comparing the macrocosm of life’s tree to the microcosm of our family’s genealogy. Our affinity for evolution must originate from the same internal chords of emotion and fascination that drive so many people to trace their bloodlines with such diligence and detail. I do not pretend to know why the documentation of unbroken heredity through generations of forebears brings us so swiftly to tears, and to such a secure sense of rightness, definition, membership, and meaning. I simply accept the primal emotional power we feel when we manage to embed ourselves into something so much larger.
    Thus, we may grasp one major reason for evolution’s enduring popularity among scientific subjects: our minds must combine the subject’s sheer intellectual fascination with an even stronger emotional affinity rooted in a legitimate comparison between the sense of belonging gained from contemplating family genealogies, and the feeling of understanding achieved by locating our tiny little twig on the great tree of life. Evolution, in this sense, is “roots” writ large.
    To close this series of three hundred essays in
Natural History
, I therefore offer two microcosmal stories of continuity—two analogs or metaphors for this grandest evolutionary theme of absolutely unbroken continuity, the intellectual and emotional center of “this view of life.” 2 My stories descend in range and importance from a tale about a leader in the founding generation of Darwinism to a story about my grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant who rose from poverty to solvency as a garment worker on the streets of New York City.
    Our military services now use the blandishments of commercial jingles to secure a “few good men” (and women), or to entice an unfulfilled soul to “be all that you can be in the army.” In a slight variation, another branch emphasizes external breadth over internal growth: join the navy and see the world.
    In days of yore, when reality trumped advertisement, this motto often did propel young men to growth and excitement. In particular, budding naturalists without means could attach themselves to scientific naval surveys by signing on as surgeons, or just as general gofers and bottle washers. Darwin himself had fledged on the
Beagle
, largely in South America, between 1831 and 1836, though he sailed (at least initially) as the captain’s gentleman companion rather than as the ship’s official naturalist. Thomas Henry Huxley, a man of similar passions but lesser means, decided to emulate his slightly older mentor (Darwin was born in 1809, Huxley in 1825) by signing up as assistant surgeon aboard HMS
Rattlesnake
for a similar circumnavigation, centered mostly on Australian waters, and lasting from 1846 to 1850.
    Huxley filled these scientific
Wanderjahre
with the usual minutiae of technical studies on jellyfishes and grand adventures with the aboriginal peoples of Australia and several Pacific islands. But he also trumped Darwin in one aspect of discovery with extremely happy and lifelong consequences: he met his future wife in Australia, a brewer’s daughter (a lucrative profession in this wild and distant outpost) named Henrietta Anne Heathorn, or Nettie to the young Hal. They met at a dance. He loved her silky hair, and she reveled in his dark eyes that “had an extraordinary way of flashing when they seemed to be burning—his manner was most fascinating” (as she wrote in her diary).
    Huxley wrote to his sister in February 1849, “I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition.” As Nettie’s only dubious trait, Hal mentioned her potential naïveté in leaving “her happiness in the hands of a man