1456 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



physiology — ^whence his introductory manual, classic for fifty years, 

 and needing little re-editing even to-day. His lectures were thus 

 unforgettable, since often equal to his best-known Protoplasm, the 

 Physical Basis of Life. From precise observation of the well-chosen 

 dissections, skeletons, and fossils on the lecture-table, emphasised 

 by swift, clear sketches on the board behind, he roused to interest 

 and trained to clearness his hearers' minds, even to enjoyment of 

 his rigorous reasoning, step by step, comparison by comparison, 

 until the full design of his discourse stood out in its clearness of 

 intellectual beauty before us, whether it were the build of crusta- 

 ceans or of crocodiles and their outline pedigrees, or that of the 

 horse. Thus what separate teachers had too long made but dull 

 anatomy here and tedious osteology there, and so on for isolated 

 subjects, were patiently wrought together into a great presentment 

 of organic form in change ; forms thus no longer static, but d5mamic, 

 physiological, evolutionary. In a word, here was our first vision of 

 Proteus in Evolution. Thus and thenceforward Goethe's term, 

 "Morphology", became for us no longer harsh and crabbed, but true 

 music of the poet's lute; and we hear in it still the tersest and most 

 enduring expression and result of his long life of scientific observa- 

 tion and meditation in philosophico-poetic spirit, and thus with 

 evolutionary insight beyond his times. 



In summary, then, for the essential ideas, the master-keys, 

 indeed, of comparative anatomy and taxonomy, of palaeontology 

 and embryology, in short the four main fields of morphology, 

 Huxley's teaching was the best of introductions, even beyond his 

 books. And so for physiology; his explanation of the dynamic 

 activity of living forms, as in locomotion, in respiration and circu- 

 lation, in nutrition, and so on, was always masterly in its simplicity 

 and clearness. His presentments of life-processes were also, as far 

 as might then be, fundamentally physical and chemical; a view by 

 him most clearly stated, though great advances have now made it 

 widely familiar. 



Beyond the four morphological sub-sciences aforesaid, Huxley 

 thus introduced not only his too few students, but largely the 

 wide public, to the conceptions of the physiological group — tl^ose 

 not only of physiology in its usual technical and restricted sense, 

 but very notably to those of evolution, of ontogeny and phylogeny. 

 For Haeckel was then teaching us to correlate the development of 

 the individual organism with that of its species and race, its verte- 

 brate or invertebrate stock; and these in boldly attempted correla- 

 tion. How this? Through "recapitulation", that of the race-histor}'' 

 in the individual's development; though this as more or less abbre- 

 viated and modified in adaptation to environment, and to internal 

 needs, and controlled by natural selection, continuously at work 

 accordingly. No wonder then that Huxley became one of the first, 



