426 MISCELLANEOUS, 1850-1860 



translating these things, but I do condemn several of the 

 translations as utterly unworthy of the Club and of England 

 and as giving us the worst repute throughout Europe for our 

 knowledge, or rather ignorance, of the spirit and language 

 of Germany, and I protest boldly against such work as Oken, 

 Braun, Schleiden, Meyer, and others, being given to the 

 British public, without one word of explanation and without 

 a sound preliminary essay on the subject, pointing out what 

 can be understood from what cannot be, by 99/100 of the 

 readers, let these be ever so clever or all (like me) ever so 

 stupid ! It would surely be much better to offer a little of 

 the money spent on the laborious translation and printing 

 of the worthless parts (the repetitions and verbiage and tru- 

 isms and trash with which all these works abound) to a good 

 preliminary essay and good notes. Good God ! are these 

 authors such Oracles that we must translate every syllable 

 and render letter for letter, lest we lose a drop of their saliva, 

 or a whiff of their flatulence ? Darwin says he does not 

 pretend to comprehend it ! I have been reading Braun's 

 Prize Essay on ' The Individual in Plants,' and like all other 

 Prize Essays, you can see it is written for a Prize, only over- 

 does and mystifies what, in the only sense we can grasp it, is 

 a very simple subject. 



Braun reminds me of a kitten playing with its own tail. 

 I could not help taking a dose of your Individuality Lecture 

 after it as a curative.^ 



The following undated note, written while wife and family 

 were away in the summer of 1856, is the echo of a contro- 

 versy then proceeding in the Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History. Huxley, in his Eoyal Institution lecture * On Natural 

 History as Knowledge, Discipline, and Power,' delivered on 

 February 15, 1856, had shown by various examples the 

 inadequacy of Cuvier's doctrine, passed on by uncritical 

 compilers, of a necessary physiological correlation of organs 

 which acts as an infallible guide in the restoration of fossils. 

 Given a tooth, then follows the shape of the jaw, the shoulder 

 blade, the forearms, the claws ; the diet and habit of the animal. 



^ ' Upon Animal Individuality.' A Friday evening discourse delivered at 

 the Royal Institution, April 30,[^1852. See T. H. Huxley : Scientific Memoirs^ 

 vol. i. 



