EARLY DAYS IN LONDON
Scientific Work as Unattached Ship-Surgeon--Introduction to
London Scientific Society--Translating, Reviewing, and
Lecturing--Ascidians--Molluscs and the Archetype--Criticism of
Pre-Darwinian Evolution--Appointment to Geological Survey.
The _Rattlesnake_ was paid off at Chatham on November 9, 1850. In the
natural course of events Huxley would have been appointed before long
to active service upon another ship. But he had no intention of
relapsing into the position of a mere navy doctor; he had accumulated
sufficient scientific material to keep him employed on scientific
investigation for years, and so he applied to the Admiralty to "be
borne on the books" of H.M.S. _Fisgard_ at Woolwich,--that is to say,
to be appointed assistant-surgeon to the ship "for particular
service," so that he should not be compelled to live on board, but
might remain in town, and, with free access to libraries and museums,
work up the observations he had made on the _Rattlesnake_ into serious
and substantial contributions to science. His request was granted,
largely by the aid of his old chief, Sir W. Burnett, who continued to
take the most useful interest in the young man he had originally
nominated to the service. In a letter to him Huxley described the
investigations which he desired to continue as being chiefly those on
"the anatomy of certain Gasteropod and Pteropod Mollusca, of Firola
and Atlantis, of Salpa and Pyrosoma, of two new Ascidians, namely,
Appendicularia and Doliolum, of Sagitta and certain Annelids, of the
auditory and circulatory organs of certain transparent Crustacea, and
of the Medusæ and Polyps." His request was granted, and for the next
three years Huxley lived in London with his brother, on the exiguous
income of an assistant-surgeon, and devoted himself to research. He
became almost at once of the first rank among English anatomists. The
result of the paper on Medusæ in the _Transactions of the Royal
Society_ was that he was elected a Fellow of the Society on June 5,
1851, and a year later received a Royal Medal of the Society. He made
many warm friendships both among the older and the younger generations
of scientific men. In his obituary notice of Huxley, Sir Michael
Foster wrote:
"By Edward Forbes, in whose nature there was much that was akin
to his own, and with whom he had some acquaintance before his
voyage, he was at once greeted as a comrade, and with Joseph
Dalton Hooker, to whom he was drawn at the very first by their
common experience as navy surgeons, he began an attachment which,
strengthened by like biological aspirations, grew closer as their
lives went on. In the first year after his return, in the autumn
of 1851, he made the acquaintance of John Tyndall at the meeting
of the British Association at Ipswich, and the three, Hooker,
Huxley, and Tyndall, finding how much in common were all their
scientific views and desires, formed then and there a triple
scientific alliance."
Repeated efforts were made by these three, and by more influential
friends, to induce the Admiralty to contribute to the expense of
publishing Huxley's scientific results, as they had given a pledge to
encourage officers who had done scientific work. These efforts lasted
unavailingly for nearly three years, and then, as Huxley says: "The
Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose, cut short the discussion by
ordering me to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and, as
Rastignac, in the _Père Goriot_, says to Paris, I said to London, _à
nous deux_." This light phrase conceals a courageous and momentous
decision. He was absolutely without private resources, and having
abandoned his professional work he had no salary of any kind. For a
year or so he supported himself by writing reviews and popular
scientific articles, striving all the time not only to gain his bread
but to continue his scientific work and make it known to the public.
He desired to get a professorship of physiology or of comparative
anatomy, and as vacancies occurred he applied, but unsuccessfully. At
the same time, he tells us, he and his friend, John Tyndall, were
"candidates, he for the Chair of Physics, and I for that of
Natural History in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately,
as it turned out, would not look at either of us. I say
fortunately, not from any lack of respect for the University of
Toronto; but because I soon made up my mind that London was the
place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the inducements
to leave it which have at various times been offered."
In these early years in London Huxley's work was most varied. A large
number of anonymous articles by him appeared in the _Literary
Gazette_, and in other periodicals. He assisted to remove the insular
narrowness from English scientific work by translating many foreign
memoirs. With the collaboration of Mr. Henfrey, he edited a series of
scientific memoirs, all of which were translated from foreign
languages, and many by his own pen. With the assistance of Mr. George
Busk he made a translation of Kölliker's _Histology_, a great treatise
on microscopic anatomy which played a large part in the development of
the modern English schools of anatomy and physiology. He made some
valuable contributions to Todd and Bowman's _Cyclopædia of Anatomy_,
an elaborate publication now nearly forgotten and practically
superseded, but which was the standard anatomical work of the middle
of this century. He was unable to progress rapidly with his work upon
oceanic Medusæ, as he was uncertain how to have it published; the
Admiralty refused to assist, and it was too lengthy for publication in
the volumes of the learned Societies. As a matter of fact, he did not
publish it until 1858, when it appeared as a separate memoir. To the
_Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_ and to the _Transactions
of the Royal and Linnæan Societies_ he contributed a large number of
memoirs dealing with the microscopic anatomy and relationships of
invertebrates, and, lastly, he gave a series of addresses at the Royal
Institution, which had been founded as a means by which leading men of
science might give accounts of their work to London society. Abstracts
of these lectures are published in the early volumes of the
_Proceedings of the Royal Institution_ and are interesting as shewing
the kinds of zoölogical subjects which were attracting the attention
of Huxley and which he considered of sufficient interest and
importance to bring to the notice of the general public. The first of
these lectures, and probably the first given in public by Huxley,
occurred on April 30, 1852, and was entitled "Animal Individuality."
The problem as to what is meant by an individual had been raised in
his mind by consideration of many of the forms of marine life,
notably compound structures like the Portuguese man-of-war, and
creatures like the salps, which form floating chains often many yards
in length. He explained that the word _individual_ covers at least
three quite different kinds of conceptions. There is, first, what he
described as arbitrary individuality, an individuality which is given
by the mind of the observer and does not actually exist in the thing
considered. Thus a landscape is in a sense an individual thing, but
only so far as it is a particular part of the surface of the earth,
isolated for the time in the mind of the person looking at it. If the
observer shift his position, the range of the landscape alters and
becomes something else. Next there are material, or practically
accidental individual things, such as crystals or pieces of stone;
and, lastly, there are living individuals which, as he pointed out,
were cycles. All living things are born into the world, grow up, and
die, and it was to the cycle of life, from the egg to the adult which
produces eggs, that he gave the name individual. In a simple animal
like Hydra there is no difficulty in accepting this plain definition
of individuality; but Huxley went on to compare with Hydra a compound
creature like the Portuguese man-of-war, which really is composed of a
colony of Hydra-like creatures, the different members of the colony
being more or less altered to serve different functions. All these
have come from the branching of a single simple creature produced from
an egg, and to the whole colony Huxley gave the name of zoölogical
individual. The salps give a still wider interpretation to this view
of individuality. The original salp produced from the egg gives rise
to many salps, which may either remain attached in a chain, or,
breaking away from one another, may live separately. Huxley extended
the use of the word _individual_ so as to include as a single
zoölogical individual the whole set of creatures cohering in chains or
breaking apart, which had been produced by budding from the product of
a single egg-cell. This subtle analysis of ideas delighted and
interested his contemporaries, and the train of logical examination of
what is meant by individuality has persisted to the present time. Like
all other zoölogical ideas, this has been considerably altered by the
conception of evolution. Zoölogists no longer attempt to stretch
logical conceptions until they fit enormous and different parts of the
living world. They recognise that the living world, because it is
alive, is constantly changing, and that living things pass through
different stages or kinds of individuality in the course of their
lives. A single egg-cell is one kind, perhaps the simplest kind, of
zoölogical individual; when it has grown up into a simple polyp it has
passed into a second grade of individuality; when, by budding, the
polyp has become branched, a third grade is reached, and when the
branches have become different, in obedience to the different purposes
which they are to serve in the whole compound creature, a still
further grade is reached. Huxley's attempt to find a meaning for
individuality that would apply equally to a single simple creature, to
a compound creature, and to the large number of separate creatures,
all developed by budding from one creature, is a striking instance of
his singular capacity for bringing apparently dissimilar facts into
harmony, by finding out the common underlying principle, and, although
we no longer accept this particular conclusion, we cannot fail to
notice in it the peculiar powers of his mind.
A second and even more interesting Royal Institution lecture dealt
with the "Identity of Structure in Animals and Plants." At the present
time every educated person knows that the life of animals and plants
alike depends on the fact that their bodies are composed of a living
material called protoplasm, a material which is identical in every
important respect in both kingdoms of the living world. In the early
fifties, scientific opinion was by no means clear on this matter, and
certainly public opinion was most vague. Huxley discussed what was
meant by organisation, and shewed that in every essential respect
plants and animals alike were organised beings. Then he went on to
explain the cellular theory of Schwann, which was then a novelty to a
general audience. Schwann, in studying the microscopic structure of
plants, noticed that their bodies were made up of little cases with
firm walls; these he called _cells_, and declared that the whole body
of the plant was composed of cells. As the walls of these cells were
the most obvious and visible feature, it was supposed that they were
the most essential part of the structure, and there was some
difficulty in applying the cellular theory to the bodies of animals,
as in most cases there are no easily visible cell-walls in animal
tissues. As the result of his own observation, and from his reading of
the work of others, Huxley laid down in the clearest way what is now
accepted by everyone--that the presence of walls is of minor
importance, and that it is the slimy contents of the cells, what is
called "protoplasm," that is the important element. He declared that
the protoplasm of animals was identical with the protoplasm of plants,
and that plants were "animals confined in wooden cases." He agreed
with Schwann that the cell, using the term to imply the contents
rather than the wall, was of fundamental importance, and was the unit
of structure of the whole world of life. On the other hand, he
declared that it could not be looked at as the unit of function: he
denied that the powers and properties of a living body were simply the
sum of the powers and properties of the single cells. In this opinion
he was not followed by physiologists until quite recently. For many
years physiologists held that cells were units of function just as
much as they are units of structure; but in the last ten years there
has been a strong return to the opinion of Huxley.
In 1851 two very important memoirs were published in the _Transactions
of the Royal Society_, which contained the results of Huxley's
observations of the interesting animals known as "tunicates." The
first of these papers begins as follows:
"The Salpæ, those strange gelatinous animals, through masses of
which the voyager in the great ocean sometimes sails day after
day, have been the subject of a great controversy since the time
of the publication of the celebrated work of Chamisso, _De
Animalibus Quibusdam e Classe Vermium Linnæana_. In this work
there were set forth, for the first time, the singular phenomena
presented by the reproductive processes of these
animals,--phenomena so strange, and so utterly unlike anything
then known to occur in the whole province of zoölogy, that
Chamisso's admirably clear and truthful account was received with
almost as much distrust as if he had announced the existence of a
veritable Peter Schlemihl."
According to Chamisso, salps appeared in two forms: solitary forms,
and forms in which a number of salps are united into a long chain.
Each salp of the aggregate form contains within it an embryo receiving
nutrition from the mother by a connection similar to the placenta by
which the embryo of a mammal receives nourishment from the blood of
the mother. These embryos grow up into the solitary form, and the
solitary form gives rise to a long chain of the aggregate form which
developes in the interior of the body. Chamisso compared this progress
to the development of insects. "Supposing," he said, "caterpillars did
not bodily change into butterflies, but by a process of sexual
breeding produced young which grew into the ordinary adults, and that
these adults, as indeed they do, gave rise to caterpillars by sexual
reproduction, then there would be a true alternation of generations."
The first generation would give rise to a second generation totally
unlike itself, and this second generation would reproduce, not its
kind, but the first generation; such an alternation of generations he
stated to occur among the salps. Huxley had an excellent opportunity
to study this question at Cape York in November, 1849. "For a time the
sea was absolutely crowded with Salpæ, in all stages of growth, and of
size very convenient for examination." He was able to verify the
general truth of Chamisso's statement. The aggregate form of Salpa
always gives rise to the solitary salps, and the solitary salps always
give rise to chains of the aggregate salps. But the process of
reproduction he shewed to be quite different in the two cases. The
solitary salp produces in its interior a little stolon or diverticulum
which contains an outgrowth from the circulatory system, and this
stolon gradually becomes pinched off into the members of the chain of
the aggregate form. The salps of the aggregate form are therefore
merely buds from the solitary form, and are not produced in the
ordinary way, by sexual generation. On the other hand, each salp of
the chain has within it a true egg-cell. This is fertilised by a male
cell, and within the body of the parent, nourished by the blood of the
parent, grows up into the solitary form. There is then an alternation
of generations, but there are not two sexual generations. The sexual
generation of chain salps gives rise to forms which reproduce by buds.
From this conclusion, with which all later observers have agreed,
Huxley went on to his theory of individuality. Different names had
been given to the two forms, but Huxley declared that neither form was
a true zoölogical individual; they were only parts of individuals or
organs, and the true individual was the complete cycle involving both
forms.
In addition to determining the interesting method of reproduction,
Huxley made an elaborate investigation of the structure of Salpa. On
one occasion only the _Rattlesnake_ came across a quantity of an
allied Ascidian, Pyrosoma, which had received its name from its
phosphorescence.
"The sky was clear but moonless, and the sea calm; and a more
beautiful sight can hardly be imagined than that presented from
the deck of the ship as she drifted, hour after hour, through
this shoal of miniature pillars of fire gleaming out of the dark
sea, with an ever-waning, ever brightening, soft bluish light, as
far as the eye could reach on every side. The Pyrosomata floated
deep, and it was only with difficulty that some were procured for
examination and placed in a bucketful of sea-water. The
phosphorescence was intermittent, periods of darkness alternating
with periods of brilliancy. The light commenced in one spot,
apparently on the surface of one of the zoöids, and gradually
spread from this as a centre in all directions; then the whole
was lighted up: it remained brilliant for a few seconds, and then
gradually faded and died away, until the whole mass was dark
again. Friction at any point induces the light at that point, and
from thence the phosphorescence spreads over the whole, while the
creature is quite freshly taken; afterwards, the illumination
arising from friction is only local."
Dealing with these creatures in the broad anatomical spirit with which
he had studied the Medusæ, Huxley shewed the typical structure
manifested in the different forms, and that was common to them and the
Ascidians or sea-squirts of the seashore. In a second paper on
"Appendicularia and Doliolum" he made further contributions to our
knowledge of these interesting creatures. Appendicularia is a curious
little Ascidian, differing from all the others in its possession of a
tail. Earlier observers had obtained it on various parts of the ocean
surface, but had failed entirely to detect its relationship to the
ordinary Ascidians. Chamisso got it near Behring's Straits and thought
that it was more nearly allied to "Venus's Girdle," a Coelenterate.
Mertens, another distinguished zoölogist, had declared that "the
relation of this animal with the Pteropods (a peculiar group of
molluscs) is unmistakable"; while Müller, a prince among German
anatomists, confessed that "he did not know in what division of the
animal kingdom to place this creature." Huxley shewed that it
possessed all the characteristic features of the Ascidians, the same
arrangement of organs, the same kind of nervous system, a respiratory
chamber formed from the fore part of the alimentary canal, and a
peculiar organ running along the pharynx which Huxley called the
endostyle and which is one of the most striking peculiarities of the
whole group. The real nature of the tail was Huxley's most striking
discovery. He pointed out that ordinary Ascidians begin life as tiny
tadpole-like creatures which swim freely by the aid of a long caudal
appendage; and that while these better-known Ascidians lose their
tails when they settle down into adult life, the Appendiculariæ are
Ascidians which retain this larval structure throughout life. Von Baer
had shown that in the great natural groups of higher animals some
forms occur which typify, in their adult condition, the larval state
of the higher forms of the group. Thus, among the amphibia, frogs have
tails in the larval or tadpole condition; but newts throughout life
remain in the larval or tailed condition. Appendicularia he considered
to be the lowest form of the Ascidians, and to typify in its adult
condition the larval stages of the higher Ascidians.
By this remarkable investigation of the structure of the group of
Ascidians, and display of the various grades of organisation, Huxley
paved the way for one of the great modern advances in knowledge. When,
later on, the idea of evolution was accepted, and zoölogists began
hunting out the pedigree of the back-boned animals, it was discovered
that Ascidians were modern representatives of an important stage in
the ancestry of vertebrate animals, and, therefore, of man himself.
There are few more interesting chapters in genealogical zoölogy than
those which reveal the relationship between Amphioxus and fish on the
one hand, and Ascidians on the other; for fish are vertebrates, and
Ascidians, on the old view, are lowly invertebrates. The details of
these relationships have been made known to us by the brilliant
investigations of several Germans, by Kowalevsky, a Russian, by the
Englishmen Ray Lankester and Willey, and by several Americans and
Frenchmen. But behind the work of all these lies the pioneer work of
Huxley, who first gathered the group of Ascidians together, and in a
series of masterly investigations described its typical structure.
Huxley's next great piece of work was embodied in a memoir published
in the _Transactions of the Royal Society_ in 1853, and which remains
to the present day a model of luminous description and far-reaching
ideas. It was a treatise on the structure of the great group of
molluscs, and displays in a striking fashion his method of handling
anatomical facts, and deducing from them the great underlying
principles of construction. The shell-fish with which he dealt
specially were those distinguished as cephalous, because, unlike
creatures such as the oyster and mussel, they had something readily
comparable with the head of vertebrates. He began by pointing out what
problems he hoped to solve. The anatomy of many of the cephalous
molluscs was known, but the relation of structures present in one to
structures present in another group had not been settled.
"It is not settled whether the back of a cuttle-fish answers to
the dorsal or ventral surface of a gasteropod. It is not decided
whether the arms and funnels of the one have or have not their
homologues in the other. The dorsal integument of a Doris and the
cloak of a whelk are both called 'mantle,' without any evidence
to show that they are really homologous. Nor do very much more
definite notions seem to have prevailed with regard to the
archetypal molluscous form, and the mode in which (if such an
archetype exist) it becomes modified in the different secondary
types."
He had taken from the surface of the sea a number of transparent
shell-fish, and had been able to study the structure and arrangement
of their organs "by simple inspection, without so much as disturbing a
single beat of their hearts." From knowledge gained in this fashion,
and from ordinary dissection of a number of common snails,
cephalopods, and pteropods, he was able to describe in a very complete
way the anatomical structure of cephalous molluscs. The next natural
step, he stated, would have been to describe the embryonic development
of the organs of these different creatures in order that a true
knowledge might be gained of what were the homologous or really
corresponding parts in each. Having had no opportunity to make such
embryological studies for himself, he fell back on numerous accounts
of development by Kölliker, Van Beneden, Gegenbauer, and others, and
so gradually arrived at a conception of what he called the "archetype"
of the cephalous molluscs. As the word _archetype_ was borrowed from
old metaphysical ideas dating back to the time of Plato, he took care
to state that what he meant by it was no more than a form embodying
all that could be affirmed equally respecting every single kind of
cephalous mollusc, and by no means an "idea" upon which it could be
supposed that animal forms had been modelled. He described this
archetype, and showed the condition of the different systems of organs
which it could be supposed to possess, and how these organs were
modified in the different existing groups. This archetypal mollusc of
Huxley's was a creature with a bilaterally symmetrical head and body.
On the ventral side of the body it possessed a peculiar locomotor
appendage, the so-called foot, and the dorsal surface of the body
secreted a shell. Its nervous system consisted of three pairs of
ganglia or brains, one pair in the head, one in the foot, and a third
in the viscera. He shewed how the widely different groups of cephalous
molluscs could be conceived as modifications of this structure, and
extended the conception so as to cover all other molluscs.
Quite apart from the anatomical value of this paper, and although all
technical details have been omitted here, it is necessary to say that
merely as a series of intricate anatomical descriptions and
comparisons, this memoir was one of the most valuable of any that
Huxley wrote. The working out of the theory of the archetype is
peculiarly interesting to compare with modern conceptions. To those of
us who began biological work after the idea of evolution had been
impressed upon anatomical work, it is very difficult to follow
Huxley's papers without reading into them evolutionary ideas. In the
article upon Mollusca, written for the ninth edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_, by Professor Ray Lankester, the same device
of an archetypal or, as Lankester calls it, a schematic mollusc, is
employed in order to explain the relations of the different structures
found in different groups of molluscs to one another. Lankester's
schematic mollusc differs from Huxley's archetypal mollusc only as a
finished modern piece of mechanism, the final result of years of
experiment, differs from the original invention. The method of
comparing the schematic mollusc with the different divergent forms in
different groups is identical, and yet, while the ideas of Darwin are
accepted in every line of Lankester's work, Huxley was writing six
years before the publication of _The Origin of Species_. There was
growing up in Huxley's mind, partly from his own attempts to arrange
the anatomical facts he discovered in an intelligible series, the idea
that within a group the divergencies of structure to be found had come
about by the modification of an original type. Not only did he
conceive of such an evolution as the only possible explanation of the
facts, but he definitely used the word _evolution_ to convey his
ideas. On the other hand, he was firmly convinced that such evolution
was confined within the great groups. For each group there was a
typical structure, and modifications by defect or excess of the parts
of the definite archetype gave rise to the different members of the
group. Moreover, he confined this evolution in the strictest possible
way to each group; he did not believe that what was called
anamorphosis--the transition of a lower type into a higher type--ever
occurred. To use his own words:
"If, however, all Cephalous Mollusca, _i.e._, all Cephalopoda,
Gasteropoda, and Lamellibranchiata, be only modifications by
excess or defect of the parts of a definite archetype, then, I
think, it follows as a necessary consequence, that no
anamorphosis takes place in this group. There is no progression
from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete
evolution of one type. It may indeed be a matter of very grave
consideration whether true anamorphosis ever occurs in the whole
animal kingdom. If it do, then the doctrine that every natural
group is organised after a definite archetype, a doctrine which
seems to me as important for zoölogy as the theory of definite
proportions for chemistry, must be given up."
It is of great historical interest to notice how closely actual
consideration of the facts of the animal kingdom took zoölogists to an
idea of evolution, and yet how far they were from it as we hold it
now. It is fashionable at the present time to attempt to depreciate
the immense change introduced by Darwin into zoölogical speculation,
and the method employed is largely partial quotation, or reference to
the kind of ideas found in papers such as this memoir by Huxley. The
comparison between the types of the great groups and the combining
proportions of the chemical elements shows clearly that Huxley
regarded the structural plans of the great groups as properties
necessary and inherent in these groups, just as the property of a
chemical element to combine with another chemical substance only in a
fixed proportion is necessary and inherent in the existing conception
of it. There was no glimmer of the idea that these types were not
inherent, but merely historical results of a long and slow series of
changes produced by the interaction of the varied conditions of life
and the intrinsic qualities of living material.
In two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1854 and 1855,
the one on "The Common Plan of Animal Forms," the other on "The
Zoölogical Arguments Adduced in Favour of the Progressive Development
of Animal Life in Time," show, so far as the published abstracts go,
the same condition of mind. The idea of progressive development of all
life from common forms was not unknown to Huxley and his
contemporaries, but was rejected by them. In the first of these two
lectures he took four great groups of animals, the Vertebrates, the
Articulata, the Mollusca, and the Radiata, and explained what was the
archetype of each. He shewed the distinctiveness of each plan of
structure, and then discussed the relations of the ideas suggested by
Von Baer to these archetypes. He stated explicitly that while the
adult forms were quite unlike one another, there were traces of a
common plan to be derived from a study of their embryonic development.
Such a trace of a common plan he had himself suggested when he
compared the foundation-membranes of the Medusæ with the first
foundation-membranes of vertebrate embryos. This was going a long way
towards modern ideas; but he stopped short, and gave no hint that he
believed in the possibility of the development of one plan from a
lower or simpler plan. The second lecture dealt with the kind of ideas
which were crystallised in the popular but striking work of Chambers,
entitled _Vestiges of Creation_. Chambers attacked the theological
view that all animals and plants had been created at the beginning of
the world, and maintained that geological evidence showed the
occurrence of a progressive development of animal life. Huxley, like
all zoölogists and geologists who knew anything of the occurrence of
fossils in the rocks of past ages, agreed with the general truth of
the conception that a progressive development had occurred which
showed that the species now existing were represented in the oldest
rocks by species now extinct. But the examples he brought forward were
all limited to evolution within the great groups, and did not affect
his idea that archetypes were fixed and did not pass into each other.
Moreover, he summed up strongly against the suggestion that there was
any parallel between the succession of life in the past and the forms
assumed by modern animals in their embryological development. So far
as the present writer is able to judge from study of the literature of
this period, the possibility of evolution was present in an active
form in the minds of Huxley and of his contemporaries, and in an
extraordinary way they brought together evidence which afterwards
became of firstrate importance; but the idea in its modern sense was
rejected by them.
In 1854 Huxley's uncomfortable period of probation came to an end.
Edward Forbes, who held the posts of Palæontologist to the Geological
Survey, and Lecturer on General Natural History at the Metropolitan
School of Science Applied to Mining and the Arts, vacated these on his
appointment to the Chair of Natural History in the University of
Edinburgh, and Sir H. De La Beche, the then Director-General of the
Geological Survey, offered both the posts to Huxley--who in June and
July of that year had given lectures at the school in place of Forbes.
Huxley says himself:
"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 palæontological."
The salary of the post of Lecturer on Natural History was scanty, but
De La Beche, who evidently recognised Huxley's genius, and was anxious
to have him attached even against his will to palæontological work,
created a place for him as Naturalist to the Geological Survey, by
which a more suitable income was found for him. His official duties
were at first in the Geological Museum of the Survey, but were
distinguished from those of the special Palæontologist, Mr. Harvey.
His income was now assured, and for the rest of his life, until
towards its close, when he retired to Eastbourne, he lived the
ordinary life of a professional man of science in London. He was now
able to marry, and on July 21, 1855, he was married to a lady whom he
had met in Sydney in 1847, and whom he had not seen since the
_Rattlesnake_ left Sydney finally in the beginning of May, 1850.
During the years 1856, 1857, and 1858, he held the post of Fullerian
Professor of Physiology in the Royal Institution, choosing as the
title of his first two courses of lectures Physiology and Comparative
Anatomy, as he still cherished the idea of being in the first place a
physiologist.
[Illustration: THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, 1857 Reproduced by permission from
_Natural Science_, vol. vii., No. 42]
"Moreover," writes Professor Michael Foster, "like most other
young professional men of science, he had to eke out his not too
ample income by labours undertaken chiefly for their pecuniary
reward. He acted as examiner, conducting for instance, during the
years 1856 to 1863, and again 1865 to 1870, the examinations in
physiology and comparative anatomy at the University of London,
making even an examination paper feel the influence of the new
spirit in biology; and among his examinees at that time there was
at least one who, knowing Huxley's writings, but his writings
only, looked forward to the _viva voce_ test, not as a trial but
as an occasion of delight. He wrote almost incessantly for all
editors who were prepared to give adequate pay to a pen able to
deal with scientific themes in a manner at once exact and
popular, incisive and correct. During this period he was
gradually passing from his first anatomical love, the structure
of the Invertebrates, to Vertebrate work, and although he
continued to take a deep interest in the course of the progress
of research in that group of animals, the publication of his
great work on oceanic hydrozoa by the Ray Society was the last
piece of important work he wrote upon any anatomical subject
apart from vertebrates. His work in connection with the
Geological Survey naturally attracted his attention most closely
to vertebrates, and, towards the close of the fifties, he was led
to make a special study of vertebrate embryology, a subject which
the investigations of Kölliker and others in Germany were
bringing into prominence. The first result of this new direction
of his enquiries was embodied in a Croonian Lecture delivered in
1858 'On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull.' Sir Richard Owen,
who was at that time the leading vertebrate anatomist in England,
had given his support to an extremely complicated view of the
skull as being formed of a series of expanded vertebræ moulded
together. The theory was really a legacy from an old German
school of which the chief members were Goethe, the poet, and
Oken, a naturalist, who was more of a metaphysical philosopher
than of a morphologist. Huxley pointed out the futility of
attempting to regard the skull as a series of segments, and of
supporting this view by trusting to superficial resemblances and
abstract reasoning, when there was a definite method by which the
actual building up of the skull might be followed. Following the
lines laid down by Rathke, another of the great Germans from
whose investigations he was always so willing to find
corroboration and assistance in his own labours, he traced the
actual development of the skull in the individual. He shewed
that the foundations of the skull and of the backbone were laid
down in a fashion quite different, and that it was impossible to
regard both skull and backbone as modifications of a common type
laid down right along the axis of the body. The spinal column and
the skull start from the same primitive condition, whence they
immediately begin to diverge. It may be true to say that there is
a primitive identity of structure between the spinal or vertebral
column and the skull; but it is no more true that the adult skull
is a modified vertebral column than it would be to affirm that
the vertebral column is a modified skull."
Since this famous lecture, a number of distinguished anatomists have
studied the development of the skull more fully; but they have not
departed from the methods of investigation laid down by Huxley, and
their conclusions have differed only in greater elaboration of detail
from the broad lines laid down by him. Apart from its direct
scientific value, this lecture was of importance as marking the place
to which Huxley had attained in the scientific world. Two years later,
it is true, the London _Times_, referring to a famous debate at a
meeting of the British Association at Oxford, spoke of him as "a Mr.
Huxley"; but in the scientific world he was accepted as the leader of
the younger anatomists, and as one at least capable of rivalling Owen,
who was then at the height of his fame. The Croonian Lecture was in a
sense a deliberate challenge to Owen, and in these days before Darwin,
to challenge Owen was to claim equality with the greatest name in
anatomical science.