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94 



JVA TURE 



[November 22, 1900 



As already mentioned, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society in 1851. He received a Royal Medal in 1852, the 

 Copley in 1888, and the Darwin Medal in 1894. 



Apart from his professional and administrative duties, 

 Huxley's work falls into three principal divisions — Science, 

 Education and Metaphysics. 



Scientific Work. 



Huxley's early papers do not appear to have in all cases at 

 first received the consideration they deserved. The only im- 

 portant one which was published before his return was the 

 one " On the Anatomy and Affinities of the Family of the 

 Medusae." 



After his return, however, there was a rapid succession of 

 valuable Memoirs, the most important, probably, being those on 

 Salpa and Pyrosoma, on Appendicularia and Doliolum and 

 on the Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca. 



In recognition of the value of these Memoirs he was elected 

 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, and received a Royal Medal 

 in 1852. Lord Rosse, in presenting it, .«aid : " In these papers 

 you have for the first time fully developed their (the Medusae) 

 structure, and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their 

 classification." "In your second paper, 'On the Anatomy of 

 Salpa and Pyrosoma' the phenomena, &c., have received the 

 most ingenious and elaborate elucidation, and have given rise 

 to a process of reasoning the results of which can scarcely 

 yet be anticipated, but must bear, in a very important degree, 

 upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called 

 transcendental physiology." 



Avery interesting result of his work on the Hydrozoa was the 

 generalisation that the two layers in the bodies of Hydrozoa 

 (Polyps and Sea Anemones), the Ectoderm and the Entoderm 

 correspond with the two primary germ layers of the higher 

 animals. Again, though he did not discover or first define ' 

 protoplasm, he took no small share in making its importance 

 known, and in bringing naturalists to recognise it as the physical 

 basis of life, and in demonstrating the unity of animal and plant 

 protoplasm. 



Among other important memoirs may be mentioned those 

 "On the Teeth and the Corpuscula Tactus." "On the 

 Tegumentary Organ^^," " Review of the Cell Theory," " On 

 Aphis," and many others. 



His palseontological work, for which he has told us that at 

 first "he did not care," began in 1855. That " On the Anatomy 

 and Affinities of the Genus Pterygotus " is still a classic ; in 

 another, " On the Structure of the Shields of Pteraspis," and in 

 one "On Cephalaspis " in 1858 he for the first time clearly 

 established their vertebrate character ; his work " On Devonian 

 Fishes " in 1861 threw quite a new light on their affinities ; 

 and amongst other later papers may be mentioned that " On 

 Hyperodapedon " ; "On the Characters of the Pelvis," "On 

 the Crayfish," and one botanical memoir, " On the Gentians," 

 the outcome of one of his Swiss trips. 



One of the most striking results of his palseontological work 

 was the clear demonstration of the numerous and close affinities 

 between Reptiles and Birds, the result of which is that ihey are 

 regarded by many as forming together a separate group, the 

 Sauropsida ; while the Amphibia, long regarded as Reptiles, 

 were separated from them and united with Fishes under the 

 title of Ichthyopsida. At the same time he showed that the 

 Mammalia were not derived from the Sauropsida, but furmed 

 two diverging lines springing from a common ancestor. And 

 besides this great generalisation, says the Royal Society 

 obituary notice, " the importance of which, both from a classi- 

 ficatory and from an evolutional point of view, needs no com- 

 ment, there came out of the same researches numerous lesser 

 contributions to the advancement of morphological knowledge, 

 including, among others, an attempt, in many respects success- 

 ful, at a classification of birds." 



In conjunction with Tyndall, he communicated to the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions a memoir on glaciers, and his interest in 

 philosophical geography was also shown in his popular treatise 

 on physiography. 



But it would be impossible here to go through all his contribu- 

 tions to science. The Royal Society Catalogue enumerates more 

 than a hundred, everyone of which, in the words of Prof. S.Parker, 

 " contains some brilliant generalisation, some new and fruitful 

 way of looking at the facts of science. The keenest morpho- 

 logical insight and inductive power are everywhere apparent ; 



NO. 162I, VOL. 63] 



but the imagination is always kept well in hand, and there are 

 none of those airy speculations — a liberal pound of theory to a 

 bare ounce of fact — by which so many reputations have been 

 made." Huxley never allowed his study of detail to prevent 

 him from taking a wide general view. 



I now come to his special work on Man. 



In the "Origin of Species," Darwin did not directly apply his 

 views to the case of Man. No doubt he assumed that the con- 

 siderations which applied to the rest of the animal kingdom 

 must apply to Man also, and I should have thought must 

 have been clear to every one, had not Wallace been in some 

 respects, much to my surprise, of a different opinion. At any 

 rate, it required some courage to stale this boldly, and much 

 skill and knowledge to s'ate it clearly. 



He put it in a manner which was most conclusive, and 

 showed, in Virchow's words, " that in respect of substance and 

 structure Man and the lower animals are one. The funda- 

 mental correspondence of human organisation with that of 

 animals is at present universally accepted." 



This, I think, is too sweeping a proposition. It may be true 

 for Germany, but it certainly is not true here. Many of our 

 countrymen and countrywomen not only do not accept, they do 

 not even understand, Darwin's theory. They seem to suppose 

 him to have held that Man was descended from one of the living 

 Apes. This, of course, is not so. Man is not descended from 

 a Gorilla or an Orang-utang, but, Man, the Gorilla, the 

 Orang-utang and other Anthropoid Apes are all descended 

 from some far away ancestor. 



" A Pliocene Homoskeleton,"Huxley said," might analogically 

 be expected to differ no more from that of modern men than the 

 CEningen canis from modern Canes, or Pliocene horses from 

 modern horses. If so, he would most undoubtedly be a man — 

 genus Homo — even if you made him a distinct species. For my 

 part, I should by no means be astonished to find the genus 

 Homo represented in the Miocene, say, the Neanderthal man, 

 with rather smaller brain capacity, longer arms, and more 

 movable great toe, but at most specifically different." 



In his work "On Man's Place in Nature," while referring to 

 the other higher Quadrumana, Huxley dwelt principally on the 

 chimpanzee and the gorilla, because, he said, "It is quite certain 

 that the ape, which most nearly approaches man in the totality 

 of its organisation, is either the chimpanzee or the gorilla." 



This is no doubt the case at present ; but the gibbons 

 (liylobates), while differing more in size, and modified in 

 adaptation to their more skilful power of climbing, must also 

 be considered, and, to judge from Piof. Dubois' remarkable dis- 

 covery in Java of Pithecanthropus, which half the authorities 

 have regarded as a small man, and half as a large gibbon, it is 

 rather down to Hylobates than either the chimpanzee or the 

 gorilla that we shall have to trace the point where the line of our 

 far-away ancestors will meet that of any existing genus of 

 monkeys. 



Huxley emphasised the faci that monkeys differ from one 

 another in bodily structure as much or more than they do from 

 man. 



We have Haeckel's authority for the statement that, " after 

 Darwin had, in 1859, reconstructed this most important bio- 

 logical theory, and by his epoch-making theory. of natural selec- 

 tion placed it on an entirely new foundation, Huxley was the 

 first who extended it to man ; and in 1863, in his celebrated 

 three lectures on ' Man's Place in Nature,' admirably worked 

 out its most important developments." 



The work was so well and carefully done that it stood the 

 test of time, and writing many years afterwards Huxley was 

 able to say, and to say truly, that 



" I was looking through ' Man's Place in Nature' the other 

 day ; I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything 

 I need add except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine 

 there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty 

 years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored 

 me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects " 

 ("Life of Prof. Huxley," p. 344). 



He has told us elsewhere ("Collected Essays," vii. p. xi.) 

 that "it has achieved the fate which is the Euthanasia of a 

 scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the 

 foundations of knowledge and forgotten." He has, however, 

 himself saved it from the tomb, and built it into the walls of the 

 temple of science, and it will still well repay the attention of the 

 student. 



For a poor man — I mean poor in money, as Huxley was all 



