Ixii 



this decennium 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 Amphi- 

 oxus, a preliminary note, and that a paper read to the Zoological 

 Society in 1876, on Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked No. 1 of the 

 series of Contributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before 

 him the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when 

 opportunity offered ; but, alas ! the opportunity which came was 

 small, the preliminary note had no full successor, and No. 1 was only 

 followed, and that after an interval of seven years, by a brief No. 2. 

 A paper " On the Characters of the Pelvis," in the ' Proceedings of 

 the Royal Society,' in 1879, is full of suggestive thought, but its con- 

 cluding passages seem to suggest that others, and not he himself, 

 were to carry out the ideas. Most of the papers of this decennium 

 deal with vertebrate morphology, and are more or less connected 

 with his former researches, but in one respect, at least, he broke 

 quite fresh ground. He had chosen the crayfish as one of the lessons 

 for the class in general biology spoken of above, and was thus drawn 

 into an interesting study of crayfishes, by which he was led to a 

 novel and important analysis of the gill plumes as evidence of affinity 

 and separation. He embodied the main results of his studies in a 

 paper to the Zoological Society, and treated the whole subject in a 

 more popular style in a book on the Crayfish. In a somewhat similar 

 way, having taken the dog as an object lesson in mammalian anatomy 

 for his students, he was led to a closer study of that common animal, 

 resulting in papers on the subject to the Zoological Society in 1880, 

 and in two lectures at the Royal Institution in 1880. He had intended 

 so to develop this study of the dog as to make it tell the tale of 

 mammalian morphology ; but this purpose, too, remained unaccom- 

 plished. 



Richer, perhaps, even than preceding decennia was this one in 

 scientific addresses and general lectures, in which his ripened judg- 

 ment drew from his immense store of knowledge wise lessons for his 

 younger brethren. Conspicuous among these was one on a theme in 

 which he might feel justifiable pride, the Friday Evening Royal 

 Institution Lecture in 1880, " On the Coming of Age of the Origin of 

 Species." 



The decennium of the eighties found him much as the previous 

 decennium had left him, but with official and multifarious duties 

 gathering still thicker round him. In 1881, the Royal School of 

 Mines was incorporated with the newly established Normal School 

 of Science (which later on, in 1891, came to be called the Royal 

 College of Science), and Huxley exchanged the title of Lecturer 

 on General Natural History for that of Professor of Biology. He 



