lv 



by his papers on the Teeth, the Corpuseula Tactus, and other topics 

 in the 4 Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science' for 1853-54, 

 and more especially by his elaborate paper on the " Tegumentary 

 Organs " in ' Todd's Cyclopaedia.' In a striking " Review of the Cell 

 Theory," which appeared in the ' British and Foreign Medical 

 Review ' in 1858, a paper which more than one young physiologist 

 at the time read with delight, and which even to-day may be studied 

 with no little profit, he, in this subject as in others, drove the sword 

 of rational inquiry through the heart of conceptions, metaphysical 

 and transcendental, but dominant. 



In the third place, the fossils, " for which he did not care," began,, 

 owing to his official position, to thrust themselves upon his notice. 

 He found that they, after all, no less than living things, presented 

 morphological problems ; indeed, he soon began to see that in many 

 cases they furnished not so much the problem as the key to the- 

 problem, sought for in vain among living forms. It was by a sort 

 of irony of fate that the study of the despised fossils, workings 

 into the study of recent forms, led him to some of the conclusions 

 by which he has most advanced the natural knowledge of the laws 

 of life. 



Nor was it long before the fossils began to exert their power. So- 

 early as 1855 he published, in conjunction with Salter, the official 

 Palaeontologist to the Snrvey, a paper " On the Affinities of a 

 Crustacean from the Ludlow Rocks, Himantopterus " (now Slimonia), 

 which was followed up four years afterwards, 1859, by a large- 

 memoir, ' On the Anatomy and Affinities of the Genus Pterygotus,' 

 still regarded as the classic work on the subject. In the same 

 year, 1855, he published a paper, " On the Structure of the Shields 

 of Pteraspis," and three years later, in 1858, one on " Cepha- 

 laspis," thus clearly establishing for the first time the vertebrate 

 nature of these remains. This was his introduction at once to fossil 

 fishes, to which he was hereafter to pay much attention, and, through 

 palaeontology, to geology. He joined the Geological Society in 1856 

 (having in the same year become a member of the Zoological Society ; 

 the Linnean he did not join until 1858), and in 1859 became one of 

 the secretaries. His work on the 'Devonian Fishes ' he embodied in 

 a memoir of the Geological Survey, published in 1861, which, though 

 entitled a Preliminary Essay, threw an entirely new light on the affini- 

 ties of these creatures, and, with the continuation published later, in 

 1866, still remains a standard work. 



The decennium of the fifties may be taken as forming one stage in 

 Huxley's career, for at the end of that period was published that 

 ' Origin of Species ' (the paper at the Linnean Society, by Darwin 

 and Wallace, was read on July 1, 1858, and the book appeared 

 on November 24, 1859), which had so great an influence not only on 



