Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his
insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by
others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not
only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested
him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself
before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of
spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations
was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great
trouble in the Navy--namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully
prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were
opened, to be full of maggots.
His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections
by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the
essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in
very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid
draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing
a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most
striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted
audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex
structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from
one form to the next.
Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was
continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms.
Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates
and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of
special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds
and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast
number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at
South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which,
in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and
which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special
groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was
suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution
to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the
Mammalia" (1880)--"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of
his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world
of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions
(begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist)
which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done
more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of
our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all
time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory
systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs
still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could
no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon
zoological work before he was sixty.
A remark made by Huxley about others is very true of himself--that
what matters most is not the microscope, but the man behind it;
not the objects seen, but the interpretation of them and their
relationships. The outward and the inward eye had the same quickness,
the same highly developed sense of form and relationship, backed by a
store of living knowledge; so well organized that it could respond
at once to any suggestion which would throw light on undiscovered
affinities and provide a true base for classification.
While much of his bookwork and writing was done at home, his later
anatomical work was done at his laboratory. As official engagements
multiplied, his time was much broken into; but he snatched every
available moment, often dashing down to South Kensington in a cab for
a half-hour of work between two official meetings. His absorption
in his studies was intense--as at one time he signs himself to his
fellow-worker, W. K. Parker, "Ever yours amphibially," so Jeffery
Parker, his demonstrator, who tells the story, came to him with a
question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in
the investigation of some invertebrate group. "Codfish?" he replied;
"that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll
consider it."
One more note concerning his method of work. His love of visualizing
his problems regularly led him to make charts to show geographically,
say, the distribution of certain forms of life over the globe, or to
illustrate points of history--such, for example, as a coloured map
of the Aegean, with fifty-mile circles drawn from the centre of the
Cyclades to illustrate the range of Greek civilization as it spread
over the shores of Asia and Europe. And as in writing a book he was
careful first to plan out the scheme of it and the balance of the
parts, so, however much his public addresses gave the impression of
being largely impromptu, he had always thought out carefully every
word he meant to say. "There is," he said, "no greater danger than
the so-called _inspiration of the moment_, which leads you to say
something which is not exactly true, or which you would regret
afterwards."
Yet his was not a strong verbal memory. It was essentially a memory
for facts; he could tear the heart out of a book as swiftly as a
Macaulay, packing the facts into the framework of his knowledge,
and always knowing thereafter where to find his facts or verify his
references. In his speeches it was the compelling thought seeking
expression, and fitting the form of expression exactly to the form
of the thought, that brought the meditated words so infallibly and so
spontaneously to his lips: they were already welded together in mind.
But he had not that kind of memory which, after once reading a page
of a book, can recite the whole word for word, whether prose or verse.
Single phrases embodying a notable image would remain with him, and
remain ready for use as allusive colour or pointed epigram. Many of
these were Biblical phrases, for he knew his Bible well, and admired
not only the grandeur of thought to be found enshrined in it, but its
magnificence as a treasure-house of our English tongue. And, apart
from many scientific terms of his invention, he coined divers words
and phrases which have enriched our language, such as "Agnostic,"
"the ladder from the gutter to the university," the descriptions of
Positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity," and the Salvation
Army methods as "Corybantic Christianity."
His working day began soon after nine, for he was never one of those
people who can do hours of work before breakfast. The working day,
however, regularly went on until midnight, and, as has been mentioned,
was often prolonged by late reading.
The speed with which his mind worked to see through complex questions
and spring swiftly to a conclusion was such that he contrived to do
four ordinary men's work in a single lifetime. But this swiftness of
reaching a conclusion, so useful at most times, was liable sometimes
to betray him. If, however, he found that he had made a mistake, he
was ready to confess the fact. The most celebrated instance of this
was the story of _Bathybius_. In 1868, while soundings were being made
in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable, certain specimens
of mud were dredged up. The mud was sticky, owing to the presence of
innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance. This was
in fine granules, which possessed neither a nucleus nor a covering
membrane. Scattered through it were calcareous coccoliths. Such
were the facts; what inference was to be drawn? The only thing this
substance resembled was one of the many simple forms of oceanic life
recently found and described by the great zoologist Haeckel.
I conceive [wrote Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the
transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded
represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which
characterize the _Radiolaria_, and a dead _Sphærozoum_ would
very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which
must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple
animated beings which have recently been so well described by
Haeckel in his _Monographie der Moneras_.
So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all
that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by
Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description
of _Bathybius_, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up
again on the voyage of the _Porcupine_ and examined in a fresh state
by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B. Carpenter, but they found no
better explanation to give of it. Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the
_Challenger_ expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as
expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens
gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before
as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on
the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved. Though
Haeckel--his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of
a close parallel near Greenland in 1876--would not desert Bathybius,
the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular
case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879
Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as
witty as it was candid.
Now, _Bathybius_ had often been pointed to as an example of almost
primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have
begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise
limitations of the matter, seized upon the _Bathybius_ recantation as
a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most
noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:--
That which interested me in the matter was the apparent
analogy of _Bathybius_ with other well-known forms of lower
life.... Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with
the matter, and if _Bathybius_ were brought up alive from the
bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have
the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin's
speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.
As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long
year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough
Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:--
Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I
assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the
devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on
the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.