2S4 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xvii 



This autumn he gladly took on what appeared to be an 

 additional piece of work. On October 12 he writes from 

 26 Abbey Place : — 



I saw Flower yesterday, and I find that my present colleague 

 in the Hunterian Professorship wishes to get rid of his share 

 in the lectures, having, I suppose, at the eleventh hour discov- 

 ered his incompetency. It looks paradoxical to say so, but it 

 will really be easier for me to give eighteen or twenty-four lec- 

 tures than twelve, so that I have professed my readiness to take 

 as much as he likes ofif his hands. 



This professorship had been in existence for more than 

 sixty years, for when the Museum of the famous anatomist 

 John Hunter was entrusted to the College of Surgeons by 

 the Government, the condition was made that " one course 

 of lectures, not less than twenty-four in number, on com- 

 parative anatomy and other subjects, illustrated by the 

 preparations, shall be given every year by some member of 

 the company." Huxley arranged to publish from year to 

 year the substance of his lectures on the vertebrates, " and 

 by that process to bring out eventually a comprehensive, 

 though condensed, systematic work on Comparative Anat- 

 omy." * 



Of the labour entailed in this course, the late Sir W. H. 

 Flower wrote : — 



When, in 1862, he was appointed to the Hunterian Pro- 

 fessorship at the College of Surgeons, he took for the subject 

 of several yearly courses of lectures the anatomy of the verte- 

 brata, 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 arrange- 

 ment 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, 



* Comparative Anatomy, vol. i. Preface. 



