lOO LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, vii 



I have been working in all things with a reference to wide 

 views of zoological philosophy, and the report upon the Echino- 

 derms is intended in common with the mem. on the Salpae to 

 explain my views of Individuality among the lower animals — 

 views which I mean to illustrate still further and enunciate still 

 more clearly in my book that is to be.* They have met with 

 approval from Carpenter, as you will see by the last edition of 

 his Principles of Physiology, and I think that Forbes and some 

 others will be very Hkely eventually to come round to them, but 

 everything that relates to abstract thought is at a low ebb among 

 the mass of naturalists in this country. 



In the paper upon " Thalassicolla," and in that which I read 

 before the British Association, as also in one upon the organisa- 

 tion of the Rotifera, which I am going to have published in the 

 Microscopical Society's Transactions, I have been driving in 

 a series of wedges into Cuvier's Radiata, and showing how selon 

 moi they ought to be distributed. 



I am every day becoming more and more certain that you 

 were on the right track thirty years ago in your views of the 

 order and symmetry to be traced in the true natural system. 



During the next session I mean to send in a paper to the 

 R.S. upon the " Homologies of the Mollusca," which shall 

 astonish them. I want to get done for the Mollusca what 

 Savigny did for the Articulata, viz. to show how they all — 

 Cephalopoda, Gasteropoda, Pteropoda, Heteropoda, etc. — are 

 organised on one type, and how the homologous organs are 

 modified in each. What with this and the book, I shall have 

 enough to do for the next six months. 



You will doubtless ask what is the practical outlook of all 

 this? whether it leads anywhere in the direction of bread and 

 cheese ? To this also I can give a tolerably satisfactory answer. 



As you won't have a Professor of Natural History at Syd- 

 ney — to my great sorrow — I have gone in as a candidate for a 

 Professorial chair at the other end of the world, Toronto in 

 Canada. In England there is nothing to be done — it is the most 

 hopeless prospect I know of; of course the Service oflfers noth- 

 ing for me except irretrievable waste of time, and the scientific 

 appointments are so few and so poor that they are not tempt- 

 ing. ... 



Had the Sydney University been carried out as originally 

 proposed, I should certainly have become a candidate for the 



* He lectured on this subject at the Royal Institution in 1852. 



