CHAPTER V 



EARLY WORK ON FOSSILS AND BACKBONED ANIMALS. 

 MUSEUM ARRANGEMENT [ 1 856-8]. 



In 1856, Huxley's official duties as Naturalist to the 

 Geological Survey began to lead him away from the 

 researches on the Invertebrates which had brought him 

 such merited distinction. This diversion, though it ulti- 

 mately led to work which was of the greatest import- 

 ance in the evolution controversy, was much against his 

 will, and he tells us in his Autobiography that when Sir 

 Henry de la Beche offered him the posts of Naturalist to 

 the Survey and Lecturer in Natural History vacated by 

 Forbes, — 



" I refused the former point-blank, and accepted the latter 

 only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for 

 fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as 

 I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for 

 thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been 

 palaeontological " (Coll. Essays, i, p. v). 



During the first sixteen years of his tenure of this 

 office he produced no fewer than thirty-eight papers and 

 memoirs on palaeontological subjects. 



His first essay of the kind, " On the Method of Palaeon- 

 tology" (Annals and Mag. Nat. Hist., xviii, 1856, pp. 

 43-54. Sci. Mem. i, xxxix, p. 432), was particularly 

 well received in North America, and was reprinted in 

 1 869 by the Smithsonian Institute. It is in part an answer 

 to an attack made by Dr. Falconer upon a Friday Evening 



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