386 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY xxm 



laying the foundation upon which his future distinction rested 

 has often been told. He had his microscope with him, and 

 he threw himself with the greatest ardour into the investiga- 

 tion of the structure of the lowly organised but beautiful 

 forms of animal life which abounded in the seas through 

 which the ship sailed, and which the surveying operations in 

 which she was engaged gave ample opportunities for observing 

 under the most favourable conditions. This was almost a new 

 field of research. He became fascinated with it, and his 

 success in its pursuit was the main cause of his adopting 

 zoology as the principal subject to engage his energies during 

 the rest of his life. 



As said before, Huxley, unlike many other zoologists, was 

 never a collector, and had not the slightest tincture of the 

 spirit of a museum curator. He cared for a specimen 

 according to the facilities it afforded for investigation. He 

 cut it up, got all the knowledge he could out of it, and threw 

 it away. I believe he never made a preparation of any kind, 

 and he cared little for dissections sealed down in bottles. 



When, in 1862, he was appointed to the Hunterian 

 Professorship at the College of Surgeons, he took for the 

 subject of several yearly courses of lectures the anatomy of 

 the vertebrata, beginning with the primates, and as the 

 subject was then rather new to him, and as it was a rule with 

 him never to make a statement in a lecture that was not 

 founded upon his own actual observation, he set to work to 

 make a series of original dissections of all the forms he treated 

 of. These were carried on in the workroom at the top of the 

 college, and mostly in the evenings, after his daily occupation 

 at Jermyn Street (the School of Mines, as it was then called) 

 was over, an arrangement which my residence in the college 

 buildings enabled me to make for him. These rooms contained 

 a large store of material, entire or partially dissected animals 

 preserved in spirit, which, unlike those mounted in the museum, 

 were available for further investigation in any direction, and 

 these, supplemented occasionally by fresh subjects from the 

 Zoological Gardens, formed the foundation of the lectures, 

 afterwards condensed into the volume on the Anatomy of 

 Vertebrated Animals, published in 1871. On these evenings 



