1858 THEORY OF THE VERTEBRATE SKULL 203 



No less important was his more general work for 

 science. Physiological study in England at this time 

 was dominated by transcendental notions. To put 

 first principles on a sound experimental basis was the 

 aim of the new leaders of scientific thought. To this 

 end Huxley made two contributions in the fifties 

 one on the general subject of the cell theory, the 

 other on the particular question of the development 

 of the skull. "In a striking 'He view of the Cell 

 Theory,'" says Sir M. Foster, "which appeared in 

 the British and Foreign Medical Review in 1853, a 

 paper which more than one young physiologist at 

 the time read with delight, and which even to-day 

 may be studied with no little profit, he, in this 

 subject as in others, drove the sword of rational 

 inquiry through the heart of conceptions, meta- 

 physical and transcendental, but dominant." 



Of this article Professor E. Kay Lankester also 

 writes : 



. . . Indeed it is a fundamenal study in morphology. 

 The extreme interest and importance of the views put 

 forward in that article may be judged of by the fact that 

 although it is forty years since it was published, and 

 although our knowledge of cell structure has made 

 immense progress during those forty years, yet the main 

 contention of that article, viz. that cells are not the cause 

 but the result of organisation in fact, are, as he says, 

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

 the sea-shore 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 outcomes, to the 



