78 HUXLEY 



those forty years, yet the main contention of that 

 article — viz., that cells are not the cause but the re- 

 sult of organisation, in fact are, as Huxley says, to 

 the tide of life what the line of shells and weeds on 

 the seashore is to the tide of the living sea — is even 

 now being reasserted, and, in a slightly modified form, 

 is by very many cytologists admitted as having more 

 truth in it than the opposed view and its later out- 

 comes, to the effect that the cell is the unit of life in 

 which and through which alone living matter mani- 

 fests our activities. 1 



The contents of the Scientific Memoirs show that in 

 all the papers which Huxley contributed to the Royal 

 Society and other learned bodies, his researches were 

 ruled not so much by the desire to classify and label 

 specimens as to establish affinities between organisms, 

 and to supersede the ill-assorted jumble, which, for 

 example, lumped crabs and bees together under one 

 heading, by an orderly and demonstrable classification. 

 Down to 1854, when he succeeded Forbes at the 

 School of Mines, his studies had been restricted to 

 invertebrates ; but from that period, fossil forms, for 

 which, as already remarked, he had no taste, 2 were to 

 occupy a main portion of his time. They appeared 

 to take him off the main track that might lead to a 

 great generalisation : he saw no solution of the prob- 

 lem of transmutation save in study of the living 

 thing ; there was, as he said in a lecture at the Royal 



1 I. 140. 2 Ante, p. 10. 



