36 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post 

 Forbes had vacated of Palaeontologist and Lecturer on Natural 

 History. I refused the former point-blank, and accepted the 

 latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care 

 for fossils, and that I should give up natural history as soon as 

 I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for 

 thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been palae- 

 ontological." 



From this time until 1885 his labors extended over the 

 widest field of biology and of philosophy ever covered by any 

 naturalist, with the single exception of Aristotle. In philos- 

 ophy Huxley showed rare critical and historical power. He 

 made the most exhaustive study of Hume, but his own philo- 

 sophical spirit and temper was more directly the offspring of 

 Descartes. Some subjects he mastered, others he merely 

 touched ; but every subject which he wrote about he illumi- 

 nated. Huxley did not discover or first define protoplasm, but 

 he made it known to the English-speaking world as the physical 

 basis of life — recognizing the unity of animal and plant proto- 

 plasm. He cleared up certain problems among the Protozoa. 

 In 1849 appeared his great work upon the oceanic Hydrozoa, 

 and familiarity with these forms doubtless suggested the bril- 

 liant comparison of the two-layered gastrula to the adult 

 hydrozoa. He threw light upon the Tunicata, describing the 

 endostyle as a universal feature, but not venturing to raise the 

 Tunicata to a separate order. He set in order the cephalopod 

 mollusca, deriving the spiral from the straight-shelled fossil 

 forms. He contributed to the Arthropoda, his last word upon 

 this group being his charming little volume upon the Cray- 

 fish, — a model of its kind. But think of the virgin field which 

 opened up before him among the vertebrata, when in 1859 he 

 was the first to perceive the truth of Darwin's theory of descent. 

 Here were Cuvier's and Owen's vast researches upon living and 

 extinct forms, a disorderly chaos of facts waiting for generali- 

 zation. Huxley was the man for the time. He had already 

 secured a thoroughly philosophical basis for his comparative 

 osteology by studying the new embryology of Von Baer, which 

 Richard Owen had wholly ignored. In 1858 his famous 



