APPENDIX II 



479 



came to nothing), and another with the Royal Geographical 

 Society on that of a North Polar Expedition, which resulted 

 in the Nares Expedition (1875). In 1873, another with the 

 Admiralty on the advisability of appointing naturalists to ac- 

 company two of the expeditions about to be despatched for ob- 

 serving the transit of Venus across the sun's disk in Mauritius 

 and Kerguelen, which resulted in three naturalists being ap- 

 pointed. Arduous as was the correspondence devolving on the 

 Biological Secretary, through the instructing and instalment of 

 these two expeditions, it was as nothing compared with the 

 official, demi-official, and private, with the Government and in- 

 dividuals, that arose from the Government request that the 

 Royal Society should arrange for the publication and distribu- 

 tion of the enormous collections brought home by the above- 

 named expedition. It is not too much to say that Mr. Huxley 

 had a voice in every detail of these publications. The sittings 

 of the Committee of Publication of the Challenger Expedition 

 collections (of which Sir J. D. Hooker was chairman, and Mr. 

 Huxley the most active member) were protracted from 1876 

 to 1895, and resulted in the publication of fifty royal quarto 

 volumes, with plates, maps, sections, etc., the work of seventy- 

 six authors, every shilling of the expenditure on which (some 

 50,000) was passed under the authority of the Committee of 

 Publication. 



Nor was Mr. Huxley less actively interested in the domestic 

 affairs of the Society. In 1873 the whole establishment was 

 translated from the building subsequently occupied by the Royal 

 Academy to that which it now inhabits in the same quadrangle ; 

 a flitting of library stuff and appurtenances involving great re- 

 sponsibilities on the officers for the satisfactory re-establishment 

 of the whole institution. In 1874 a very important alteration 

 of the bye-laws was effected, whereby that which gave to Peers 

 the privilege of being proposed for election as Fellows, without 

 previous selection by the Committee (and to which bye-laws, 

 as may be supposed, Mr. Huxley was especially repugnant), 

 was replaced by one restricting that privilege to Privy Council- 

 lors. In 1875 he actively supported a proposition for extending 

 the interests taken in the Society by holding annually a recep- 

 tion, to which the lady friends of the Fellows who were in- 

 terested in science should be invited to inspect an exhibition of 

 some of the more recent inventions, appliances and discoveries 

 in science. And in the same year another reform took place in 

 which he was no less interested, which was the abolition of the 



