778 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mains of classic value, had been driven to earn his bread as an 

 ophthalmic surgeon, and an even greater physiologist, William 

 Bowman, was following the same course. There was no opening 

 in physiology for the young student at Charing Cross, and he was 

 driven by stress of circumstances to morphological rather than to 

 strictly physiological problems ; but it was not until long after, 

 when he had achieved eminence as a morphologist, that he finally 

 abandoned his old wish to hold a physiological chair. 



Looking back on the past, we may now be glad that circum- 

 stances were against his wishes ; for (though in every branch of 

 science there is need at all times of a great man) there was at the 

 middle of the century, in the early fifties, a special need in mor- 

 phology for a man of Huxley's mold. Richard Owen was then 

 dominant, and it is an acknowledged feature of Owen's work that 

 in it there was a sudden leap from most admirable detailed de- 

 scriptive labor to dubious speculations, based for the most part 

 on, or at least akin to, the philosophy of Oken. Of the " new 

 morphology" in which Johannes Miiller was leading the way, 

 and the criteria of which had been furnished by the labors of von 

 Baer, there was then but little in England save, perhaps, what 

 was to be found in the expositions of Carpenter. Of this new 

 morphology, by which this branch of biology was brought into a 

 line with other exact sciences, and the note of which was not to 

 speculate on guiding forces and on the realization of ideals, but 

 to determine the laws of growth by the careful investigation, as 

 of so many special problems, of what parts of different animals, 

 as shown among other ways by the mode of their development, 

 were really the same or alike, Huxley became at once an apostle. 

 His very first work, that on the Medusae,, wrought out amid the 

 distractions of ship life, written on a lonely vessel plowing its 

 solitary way amid almost unknown seas, away from books and 

 the communion of his fellow-workers, bears the same marks which 

 characterize his subsequent memoirs ; it is the effort of a clear 

 mind striving to see its way through difficult problems, bent on 

 holding fast only to that which could be proved. This is not the 

 occasion to insist in detail on the value of the like morphological 

 work which he produced in the fifties and the sixties, or to show 

 how he applied to other forms of animal life, to echinoderms, to 

 tunicates, to arthropods, to molluscs, and last though not least to 

 vertebrates, the same method of inquiry which guided the work 

 on the Medusae,. Nor need I dwell on the many valuable results 

 which he gained for science by attacking in the same spirit the 

 problems offered by the remains of extinct forms. Moreover, he 

 strengthened the effect of his own labors by admirable exposi- 

 tions of the results of others. Further, unlike his great prede- 

 cessor, who formed no school and had few if any disciples, it was 



