l6o LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xi 



Explanatory Catalogue to serve as an introductory text- 

 book to the Jermyn Street lectures and the paleontological 

 demonstrations. Here, too, would fall a proposed " Letter 

 on the Study of Comparative Anatomy," to do for those 

 subjects what Henslow had done in his " Letter " for 

 Botany. 



In addition to the fact of his being forced to take up 

 Paleontology, it was perhaps the philosophic breadth of 

 view with which he regarded his subject at any time, and 

 the desire of getting to the bottom of each subsidiary prob- 

 lem arising from it, that made him for many years seem 

 constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly ofiE 

 at a tangent from the line in which he was assured of un- 

 rivalled success did he but devote to it his undivided powers. 

 But he was prepared to endure the charge of desultori- 

 ness with equanimity. In part, he was still studying the 

 whole field of biological science before he would claim 

 to be a master in one department ; in part, he could not 

 yet tell to what post he might succeed when he left — as 

 he fully expected to leave — the professorship at Jermyn 

 Street. 



One characteristic of his early papers should not pass 

 unnoticed. This was his familiarity with the best that had 

 been written on his subjects abroad as well as in England. 

 Thoroughness in this respect was rendered easier by the fact 

 that he read French and German with almost as much 

 facility as his mother tongue. " It is true, of course, that 

 scientific men read French and German before the time of 

 Huxley ; but the deliberate consultation of all the authori- 

 ties available has been maintained in historical succession 

 since Huxley's earliest papers, and was absent in the papers 

 of his early contemporaries." * 



About this time his activity in several branches of sci- 

 ence began to find recognition from scientific societies at 

 home and abroad. In 1857 he was elected honorary mem- 

 ber of the Microscopical Society of Giessen; and in the 

 same year, of a more important body, the Academy of 



* P. Chalmers Mitchell in Natural Science, Augusi 1895. 



