Boyal Microscopical Society. 93 



block j)ieces, as found, e. g. in the young hog, the cementing slab 

 covering the big neural rib head likewise, and not only the pentagonal 

 prismatic block. The first disciform ossification we &id in the 

 corals, forming cribrose ethmoidal discs, such as the closely set ' sigil- 

 late imj)ressions ' of the Astrcea, and afterwards left behind as the 

 coccyx, e. g, of Byathoi^hyllum " {sic). 



I hope, ]ike Kichard Baxter's friends, we shall have no more 

 " Last Words " ; but that this dying song of a false philosophy, 

 which has been wafted to us across the Atlantic, will soon cease its 

 echoes ; and that our attention may be no longer diverted from 

 honest work. 



And now I must acknowledge, with some shame, that the noble 

 band of workers who have laid a sure foundation of vertebrate 

 morphology are, with one or two exceptions, foreigners ; mostly 

 Germans. I have mentioned three of these, Baer, Keichert, and 

 liathke ; but I must also tell of Miiller, Hallmann, Kostlin, Eemak, 

 Vogt, and Agassiz, and more recently Kolliker, Max Schultze, and 

 Gegenbaur. Our great Scotch anatomist, Goodsir, was unfortu- 

 nately entangled in the meshes of transcendentalism, and his most 

 important paper on the Morphology of the Skull, which appeared 

 in the ' Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal' for 1857, although 

 rich in ideas, is yet a hopeless mixture of observation and specu- 

 lation. Just at this time, when for us there seemed no hope of 

 native workers who should emulate the Germans, Huxley suddenly 

 arose. 



Some of you, I dare say, have seen a small modest-looking paper 

 in the ' Proceedings of the Pioyal Society,' entitled " The Croonian 

 Lecture on the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull." It was delivered 

 before the Eoyal Society on the 17th of June, 1858, by Professor 

 T. H. Huxley. 



That memoir has been before me continually, and I have read 

 therein day and night ; it is a lamp bright with pure, intellectual 

 light ; or it may be compared with the mustard-seed of the sacred 

 parable, which, though inconspicuous, is destined to grow into a 

 fair and large tree, I will now give you the author's account of 

 the importance of Development — morphology — as compared with 

 a mere collation of the structure of adult forms — the Gradational 

 Method. 



" The study of the gradations of structure presented by a series of 

 living beings may have the utmost value in suggesting homologies, 

 but the study of development alone can finally demonstrate them. 



" Before the year 1837, the philosophers who were occupied with 

 the Theory of the Skull confined themselves almost wholly to the 

 first-mentioned mode of investigation, which may be termed the 

 ' method of gradations.' 



" If they made use of the second method at all they went no 



