428 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxvii 



and really only the continuation of that movement. But there 

 is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the 

 movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free 

 thought and traditional authority. One or other will have to 

 succumb after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have 

 as side issues vast political and social troubles. I have no more 

 doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I have 

 that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will 

 organise itself into a coherent system, embracing human life 

 and the world as one harmonious whole. But this organisation 

 will be the work of generations of men, and those who further 

 it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to 

 rest in no verbal delusions. I may be able to help a little in 

 this direction — perhaps I may have helped already. For the 

 present, however, I am disposed to draw myself back entirely 

 into my own branch of physical science. There is enough and 

 to spare for me to do in that line, and, for years to come, I do 

 not mean to be tempted out of it. 



Strangely enough, this was the one thing he was des- 

 tined not to do. Official work multiplied about him. From 

 1870 to 1884 only two years passed without his serving on 

 one or two Royal Commissions. He was Secretary of the 

 Royal Society from 1871 to 1880, and President from 1883 

 to his retirement, owing to ill-health, in 1885. He became 

 Dean as well as Professor of Biology in the College of 

 Science, and Inspector of Fisheries. Though he still man- 

 aged to find some time for anatomical investigations, and 

 would steal a precious hour or half hour by driving back 

 from the Home Office to his laboratory at South Kensing- 

 ton before returning home to St. John's Wood, the amount 

 of such work as he was able to publish could not be very 

 great. 



His most important contributions during this decennium 

 (writes Sir M. Foster) were in part continuations of his former 

 labours, such as the paper and subsequent full memoir on 

 Stagonolepis, which appeared in 1875 and 1877, and papers on 

 the Skull. The facts that he called a communication to the 

 Royal Society, in 1875,* on Amphioxus, a preliminary note, 

 and that a paper read to the Zoological Society in 1876, on 



* Written 1874. 



