124 NATURAL SCIENCE. August, 



pleasant to read of now, of cheering Darwin, who was smarting 

 under the ill-informed and ill-natured notices in the A thenaum and so 

 forth. 



Huxley, with Lyell and Hooker, were the persons to whose 

 judgment Darwin looked forward with most interest ; and Huxley, 

 who was first of the three to become a convert, remained for many 

 years the chief exponent of Darwinism. It is not necessary to enter 

 into the details of the conflict ; it is in the knowledge of all that it 

 was Huxley who made most converts among scientific and educated 

 persons, and that it was his brilliant rhetoric and intolerable satire 

 that drove the champions of dogma from their position of blustering 

 abuse. 



As I have already said, much of Huxley's work after 1859 was 

 determined by his connection with palaeontology ; it is here dealt 

 with by Mr. Smith Woodward. The later zoological work was 

 chiefly upon vertebrates, and its striking feature was the series of 

 advances it made in classification. Thus, he grouped together the 

 birds and reptiles, inventing the term Sauvopsida for them. His 

 classification of birds, based in the main upon osteological characters, 

 is the foundation of all the modern classifications. His arrangement 

 of the mammals is the basis of the existing classifications. His 

 treatise upon the homologies of the ear-bones was a great advance 

 upon current views ; although other observers, chiefly those who pay 

 attention to embryology, have considerably modified the homologies 

 he accepted. His great paper on the skull and pectoral fin of 

 Ceratodiis, and on the archipterygium and its relations to fins and 

 limbs, left a permanent impression upon vertebrate morphology. 

 Here he first clearly distinguished the typical (" hyostylic ") fish- 

 skull from that (" autostylic ") of the mud-fishes, chimaeras, and 

 higher vertebrates. His elaborate work upon anthropoid apes, 

 although in certain points it has not been accepted as final, com- 

 pletely upset those anatomists who disputed the practical identity of 

 structure in man and the apes. 



If Huxley was great as an investigator, he was even greater as a 

 teacher. Probably no one man ever wrote a set of books that have 

 been read by so many students, and have had so much influence 

 upon methods of education. His introductory primer, written for 

 Macmillan's series, has gone into innumerable editions, and has 

 formed the method of thinking in half the children who have been to 

 school since it was published. His book upon physiography has 

 created a new industry ; and although, from what I saw of students 

 and teachers of physiography during two years in which I was 

 occupied in directing and inspecting elementary scientific education 

 in a Midland county, I am convinced that the invention of this 

 selection of the tit-bits of sciences was an educational disaster, still 

 the invention was a great achievement. On the other hand, 

 Huxley's elementary text-book of physiology has probably been as 



