January 31, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



149 



separate order. He set in order the ceplia- 

 lopod mollusca, deriving the spiral fi-om 

 the straight shelled fossil forms. He con- 

 tributed to the Arfchropoda ; his last word 

 upon this group being his charming littlp 

 volume upon the ' Crayfish,' a model of its 

 kind. But think of the virgin field which 

 opened up before him among the vertebrata, 

 when in 1859 he was the first to perceive 

 the truth of Darwin's theory of descent. 

 Here were Cuvier's and Owen's vast re- 

 searches upon living and extinct forms, a 

 disorderly chaos of facts waiting for gen- 

 eralization. Huxley was the man for the 

 time. He had already secured a thoroughly 

 philosophical basis for his comparative os- 

 teology by studying the new embryology of 

 Von Baer, which Eichard Owen had wholly 

 ignored. In 1858 his famous Croonian 

 lecture on the ' Theory of the Vertebrate 

 Skull' gave the death blow to Owen's life 

 work upon the skull and vertebral arche- 

 type, and to the whole system of mj'stical 

 and transcendental anatomy; and now 

 Huxley set to work vigorouslj^ to build out 

 of Owen's scattered tribes the great limbs 

 and branches of the vertebrate tree. He 

 set the fishes and batrachia apart as the 

 lethyopsidan branch, the reptiles and birds 

 as the Sauropsidan in contrast with the 

 Mammalian, which he derived from a pro- 

 sauropsidan or amphibian- stem, a theory 

 which with some modification has received 

 strong recent verification. 



Prof. Owen, who had held undisputed 

 sway in England up to 1858, fought nobly 

 for opinions which had been idolized in the 

 first half century, but was routed at every 

 point. Huxley captured his last fortress, 

 when, in his famous essay of 1865, ' Man's 

 Place in Nature,' he undermined Owen's 

 teaching of the separate and distinct ana- 

 tomical position of Man. We can only ap- 

 preciate Huxley's fighting qualities when 

 we see how strongly Owen was intrenched 

 at the beginning of this long battle royal ; 



he was director of the British Museum and 

 occupied other high posts; he had the 

 strong moral support of the government 

 and of the royal family, although these were 

 weak allies in a scientific encounter. 



Huxley's powers of rapid generalization 

 of course betrayed him frequently ; his 

 Bathybius was a groundless and short-lived 

 hypothesis ; he went far astray in the phy- 

 logeny of the horses. But these and other 

 errors were far less attributable to defects 

 in his reasoning powers than to the extra- 

 ordinarily high pressure under which he 

 worked for the twenty years between 1860 

 and 1880, when duties upon the Educational 

 Board, upon the Government Fisheries 

 Commission and upon Parliamentary com- 

 mittees crowded upon him. He had at his 

 command none of the resources of modern 

 technique. He cut his own sections. I re- 

 member once seeing some of his microscopic 

 sections. To one of our college junior stu- 

 dents working with a Minot microtome 

 Huxley's sections would have appeared like 

 translucent beefsteaks — another illustra- 

 tion that it is not always the section which 

 reveals the natural law, but the man who 

 looks at the section. 



Huxley was not only a master in the 

 search for truth, but in the way in which 

 he presented it, both in writing and in 

 speaking. And we are assured, largely as 

 he was gifted by nature, his beautifully 

 lucid and interesting style was partly the 

 result of deliberate hard work. He was not 

 born to it ; some of his early essays are rath- 

 er labored; he acquired it. He was familiar 

 with the best Greek literature and restudied 

 the language ; he pored over Milton and 

 Carlyle and Mill ; he studied the fine old 

 English of the Bible ; he took as especial 

 models Hume and Hobbes, until finally he 

 wrote his mother tongue as no other Eng- 

 lishman wrote it. Take up any one of his 

 essays, biological, literary, philosophical, 

 you at once see his central idea and his 



