1895. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 45 
the skull and vertebral archetype, and to the whole system of 
mystical and transcendental anatomy ; and now Huxley set to 
work vigorously 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 Jcthyopsidan branch, the reptiles 
and birds as the Sauropsidan 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. 
Prof. 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. Huxley cap- 
tured his last fortress, when, in his famous essay of 1865, 
““Man’s Place in Nature,” he undermined Owen’s teaching 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 roy ral ; 
he was director of the British Museum and occupied other 
high posts ; he had the strong moral support 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 Bathybius 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 attributable 
to defects in his reasohing powers than to the extraordinarily 
high pressure under which he worked for the twenty years be- 
tween 1860 and 1880, when duties upon the Educational Board, 
upon the Government Fisheries Commission and upon Par- 
liamentary committees crowded upon him. He had at his com- 
mand none of the resources of modern technique. 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 which reveals the natural law, but the man who 
looks at the section. 
Huxley was not only a master in the search for truth, but in 
the way in which he presented it, both in writing and in speak- 
ing. And we are assured, largely as he was gifted by nature, 
his beautifully lucid and interesting style was partly the result 
of deliberate hard work. He was not born to it; some of his 
early essays are very labored; he acquired it. He was familiar 
with the best Greek literature and restudied the language; he 
pored over Miltonand Carlyle and Mill; he studied the fine old 
