340 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XVII 



that process to bring out eventually a comprehensive, 

 though condensed, systematic work on Comparative 

 Anatomy." l 



Of the labour entailed in this course, the late Sir 

 W. H. Flower wrote : 



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 

 which 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. . . . On these evenings it was 

 always my privilege to be with him, and to assist in the 

 work in which he was engaged. In dissecting, as in 

 everything else, he was a very rapid worker, going 

 straight to the point he wished to ascertain with a firm 

 and steady hand, never diverted into side issues, nor 

 wasting any time in unnecessary polishing up for the 

 sake of appearances ; the very opposite, in fact, to what 

 is commonly known as " finikin." His great facility for 



1 Comparative Anatomy, vol. i. Preface. 



