HUXLEY'S LIFE AND WORK. 345 



to publish such a book at that time was a bold step. But the prophecy 

 with which he concluded the work is coming true. 



"After passion and prejudice have died away," he said, "the same 

 result will attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great 

 Alps and Andes of the living world — Man. Our reverence for the nobility 

 of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is, in sub- 

 stance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the 

 marvelous endowments of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in 

 the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and or- 

 ganized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of 

 every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon 

 it as on a mountain top — far above the level of his humble fellows, and 

 transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray 

 from the infinite source of truth" ('Collected Essays,' vii., p. 155). 



Another important research connected with the work of our Society 

 was his investigation of the structure of the vertebrate skull. Owen had 

 propounded a theory and worked it out most ingeniously that the skull 

 was a complicated elaboration of the anterior part of the back-bone; that 

 it was gradually developed from a preconceived idea or archetype; that 

 it was possible to make out a certain number of vertebrae, and even the 

 separate parts of which they were composed. 



Huxley maintained that the archetypal theory was erroneous; and 

 that, instead of being a modification of the anterior part of the primitive 

 representative of the back-bone, the skull is rather an independent 

 growth around and in front of it. Subsequent investigations have 

 strenghtened this view, which is now generally accepted. This lecture 

 marked an epoch in vertebrate morphology, and the views he enunciated 

 still hold the field. 



One of the most interesting parts of Huxley's work, and one specially 

 connected with our Society, was his study of the ethnology of the British 

 Isles. It has also an important practical and political application, because 

 the absurd idea that ethnologically the inhabitants of our islands form 

 three nations — the English, Scotch and Irish — has exercised a malig- 

 nant effect on some of our statesmen, and is still not without influence 

 on our politics. One of the strongest arguments put forward in favor 

 of Home Eule used to be that the Irish were a 'nation.' In 1887 I 

 attacked this view in some letters to the 'Times,' subsequently published 

 by Quaritch. Nothing is more certain than that there was not a Scot 

 in Scotland till the seventh century; that the east of our island from 

 John 0' Groat's House to Kent is Teutonic; that the most important 

 ethnological line, so far as there is one at all, is not the boundary be- 

 tween England and Scotland, but the north and south watershed which 

 separates the east and west. In Ireland, again, the population is far 

 from homogeneous. Huxley strongly supported the position I had 



