A STUDENT'S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. T^'j 



Croonian lecture on the "Theory of the Vertebrate Skull" 

 gave the deathblow to Owen's life-work upon the skull and 

 vertebral archetype, and to the whole system of mystical and 

 transcendental anatomy ; and now Huxley set to work vigor- 

 ously to build out of Owen's scattered tribes the great limbs 

 and branches of the vertebrate tree. He set the fishes and 

 batrachia apart as the IctJiyopsidan branch, the reptiles and 

 birds as the Smiropsidan in contrast with the Mammalian, 

 which he derived from a pro-sauropsidan or amphibian stem, — 

 a theory which, with some modification, has received strong 

 recent verification. 



Professor Owen, who had held undisputed sway in England 

 up to 1858, fought nobly for opinions which had been idolized 

 in the first half-century, but was routed at every point. Hux- 

 ley captured his last fortress when, in his famous essay of 

 1865, "Man's Place in Nature," he undermined Owen's teach- 

 ing of the separate and distinct anatomical position of man. 

 We can only appreciate Huxley's fighting-qualities when we 

 see how strongly Owen was intrenched at the beginning of 

 this long battle royal. He was director of the British Museum, 

 and occupied other high posts ; he had the strong moral sup- 

 port of the government and of the royal family, although these 

 were weak allies in a scientific encounter. 



Huxley's powers of rapid generalization of course betrayed 

 him frequently. His Bathybuis was a groundless and short- 

 lived hypothesis ; he went far astray upon the phylogeny of 

 the horses. But these and other errors were far less attribu- 

 table to defects in his reasoning powers than to the extraordi- 

 narily high pressure under which he worked for the twenty 

 years between i860 and 1880, when duties upon the Educa- 

 tional Board, upon the Government Fisheries Commission, 

 and upon Parliamentary committees crowded upon him. He 

 had at his command none of the resources of modern tech- 

 nique. He cut his own sections. I remember once seeing 

 some of his microscopic sections. To one of our college 

 junior students working with a Minot microtome Huxley's 

 sections would have appeared like a translucent beefsteak, 

 — another illustration that it is not always the section 



