1 



One effect of the publication of these researches was to bring their 

 author, almost at a single bound, into the first rank of English 

 anatomists. Within eight months of his return, namely, on June 5, 

 1851, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the follow- 

 ing year he received a Royal Medal of the Society " for his papers on 

 the anatomy and affinities of the Medusee," the other Royal Medal of 

 the same year being given to Joule, the Rumford Medal to Stokes, 

 and the Copley Medal to Humboldt. 



In judging of the value to be allotted to these early papers by 

 Huxley, the condition of comparative anatomy at that time in Eng- 

 land must be had in mind. There were several zealous and active 

 systematic zoologists, but in comparative anatomy itself, in the 

 science of animal morphology, the only notable labourers were 

 Richard Owen and John Goodsir. The latter, moreover, was work- 

 ing on so special a line, and in so special a manner, that the former 

 may be said to have been almost standing alone. And his work con- 

 sisted, on the one hand, of detailed descriptions, possessing the highest 

 merit and greatest value, of the structure of an immense number of 

 animal forms, and, on the other hand, of generalisations and specula- 

 tions of a metaphysical kind, based largely on the philosophy of Oken, 

 and, as time has since proved, of a fruitless, barren nature. The more 

 sober method of determining the true homologies of animal structures, 

 and the true affinities of animal forms, of which the criteria had been 

 furnished by the labours of von Baer, and which was being fruitfully 

 worked in Germany by Johannes Miiller, the method which led the 

 anatomist to face his problems in the same spirit in which the 

 physicist faced his, was almost unknown, or at least unused, in Eng- 

 land. It was, it is true, appreciated by Carpenter, but he at that 

 time was much more of an expositor than an investigator. Of the 

 value of this method, to the knowledge of which he mast have been 

 led by his solitary readings in his old Charing Cross days, Huxley's 

 early papers came as a startling and convincing proof, and in the 

 words with which the then President of the Royal Society, the Earl 

 of Rosse, accompanied the presentation of the Royal Medal, it is not 

 difficult, reading between the lines, to recognise the appreciation of 

 a new spirit of anatomical inquiry, not wholly free from a timorous 

 apprehension as to its complete validity. " In those papers you have 

 for the first time fully developed their (the Medusae) structure, and 

 laid the foundation of a rational theory for their classification. " 

 "In your second paper, 'On the Anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma,* 

 the phenomena, &c, have received the most ingenious and elaborate 

 elucidation, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results, 

 of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a vary im- 

 portant degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be 

 called transcend 3ntal physiology." 



