426 MISCELLANEOUS, 1850-1860 
translating these things, but I do condemn several of the 
translations as utterly unworthy of the Club and of England 
and as giving us the worst repute throughout Europe for our 
knowledge, or rather ignorance, of the spirit and language 
of Germany, and I protest boldly against such work as Oken; 
Braun, Schleiden, Meyer, and others, being given to the 
British public, without one word of explanation and without 
a sound preliminary essay on the subject, pointing out what 
can be understood from what cannot be, by 99/100 of the 
readers, let these be ever so clever or all (hke me) ever so 
stupid ! It would surely be much better to offer a little of 
the money spent on the laborious translation and printing 
of the worthless parts (the repetitions and verbiage and tru- 
isms and trash with which all these works abound) to a good 
preluninary essay and good notes. Good God ! are these 
authors such Oracles that we must translate every syllable 
and render letter for letter, lest we lose a drop of their saliva, 
or a wdiiff of their flatulence ? Darwin says he does not 
pretend to comprehend it ! I have been reading Braun's 
Prize Essay on ' The Individual in Plants,' and like all other 
Prize Essays, you can see it is written for a Prize, only over- 
does and mystifies what, in the only sense we can grasp it, is 
a very simple subject. 
Braun reminds me of a kitten playing with its own tail. 
I could not help taking a dose of your Individuality Lecture 
after it as a curative.^ 
The following undated note, written while wife and family 
were away in the summer of 1856, is the echo of a contro- 
versy then proceeding in the Annals and Magazine of Natural 
History. Huxley, in his Koyal Institution lecture ' On Natural 
History as Knowledge, Discipline, and Power,' delivered on 
February 15, 1856, had shown by various examples the 
inadequacy of Cuvier's doctrine, passed on by uncritical 
compilers, of a necessary physiological correlation of organs 
which acts as an infallible guide in the restoration of fossils. 
Given a tooth, then follows the shape of the jaw, the shoulder 
blade, the forearms, the claws ; the diet and habit of the animal. 
^ ' Upon Animal Individuality.' A Friday evening discourse delivered at 
the Royal Institution, April 30, 1852. See T. H. Huxley : Scientific Memoim, 
vol. i. 
