CHAPTER X 

 1855-1858 



Up to his appointment at the School of Mines, Huxley's 

 work had been almost entirely morphological, dealing with 

 the Invertebrates. His first investigations, moreover, had 

 been directed not to species-hunting, but to working out the 

 real affinities of little known orders, and thereby evolving 

 a philosophical classification from the limbo of " Vermes " 

 and " Radiata." 



He had continued the same work by tracing homologies 

 of development in other classes of animals, such as the 

 Cephalous Mollusca, the Articulata, and the Brachiopods. 

 On these subjects, also, he had a good deal of correspond- 

 ence with other investigators of the same cast of mind, and 

 even when he did not carry conviction, the impression made 

 by his arguments may be judged from the words of Dr. All- 

 man, no mean authority, in a letter of May 2, 1852 : — 



I have thought over your arguments again and again, and 

 while I am the more convinced of their ingenuity, originality, 

 and strength, I yet feel ashamed to confess that I too must ex- 

 claim " tenax propositi." When was it otherwise in contro- 

 versy ? 



Other speculations arising out of these researches had 

 been given to the public in the form of lectures, notably 

 that on Animal Individuality at the Royal Institution in 

 1852. 



But after 1854, Paleontology and administrative work 

 began to claim much of the time he would willingly have 

 bestowed upon distinctly zoological research. His lectures 

 142 



