Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 18

1. A series of lectures on Species, practical discrimination and description, modification by conditions and distribution;

2. Lectures on the elements of Botany and Fossil Plants."

[This reorganisation of his course went hand in hand with his utilisation of the Jermyn Street Museum for paleontological teaching, and all through 1857 he was busily working at the Explanatory Catalogue.

Moreover, in 1855 he had begun at Jermyn Street his regular courses of lectures to working men--lectures which impressed those qualified to judge as surpa.s.sing even his cla.s.s lectures. Year after year he gave the artisans of his best, on the principle enunciated thus early in a letter of February 27, 1855, to Dyster:--]

I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures (POPULAR Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about to give here. I want the working cla.s.ses to understand that Science and her ways are great facts for them--that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest--not because fellows in black with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of nature which they must obey "under penalties."

I am sick of the dilettante middle cla.s.s, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts. You will be with me, I know.

[And again on May 6, 1855:--]

I am glad your lectures went off so well. They were better attended than mine [the Preliminary Course], although in point of earnestness and attention my audience was all I could wish. I am now giving a course of the same kind to working men exclusively--one of what we call our series of "working men's lectures," consisting of six given in turn by each Professor. The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full.

I believe in the fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I would willingly give some when I come to Tenby.

[The corresponding movement set going by F.D. Maurice also claimed his interest, and in 1857 he gave his first address at the Working Men's College to an audience, as he notes, of some fifty persons, including Maurice himself.

Other work of importance was connected with the Royal Inst.i.tution. He had been elected to deliver the triennial course as Fullerian Professor, and for his subject in 1856-57 chose Physiology and Comparative Anatomy; in 1858, the Principles of Biology.

He was extremely glad of the additional "grist to the mill" brought in by these lectures. As he wrote in 1890:--]

I have good reason to know what difference a hundred a year makes when your income is not more than four or five times that. I remember when I was candidate for the Fullerian professorship some twenty-three years ago, a friend of mine asked a wealthy manager to support me. He promised, but asked the value of the appointment, and when told, said, "Well, but what's the use of a hundred a year to him?" I suppose he paid his butler that.

[A further attempt to organise scientific work throughout the country and make its results generally known, dates from this time. Huxley, Hooker, and Tyndall had discussed, early in 1858, the possibility of starting a "Scientific Review," which should do for science what the "Quarterly" or the "Westminster" did for literature. The scheme was found not to be feasible at the time, though it was revived in another form in 1860; so in the meanwhile it was arranged that science should be laid before the public every fortnight, through the medium of a scientific column in the "Sat.u.r.day Review." The following letter bears on this proposal:--]

April 20, 1858.

My dear Hooker,

Before the dawn of the proposal for the ever-memorable though not-to-be "Scientific Review," there had been some talk of one or two of us working the public up for science through the "Sat.u.r.day Review."

Maskelyne (you know him, I suppose) was the suggester of the scheme, and undertook to talk to the "Sat.u.r.day" people about it.

I think the whole affair had dropped through, but yesterday Maskelyne came to me and to Ramsay with definite propositions from the "Sat.u.r.day"

editor.

He undertakes to put in a scientific article in the intermediate part between Leaders and Reviews once a fortnight if we will supply him. He is not to mutilate or to alter, but to take what he gets and be thankful.

The writers to select their own subjects. Now the question is, Will seven or eight of us, representing different sciences, join together and undertake to supply at least one article in three months? Once a fortnight would want a minimum of six articles in three months, so that if there were six, each man must supply one.

Sylvester is talked of for Mathematics. I am going to write to Tyndall about doing Physics. Maskelyne and perhaps Frankland will take Chemistry and Mineralogy. You and I might do Biology; Ramsay, Geology; Smyth, Technology.

This looks to me like a very feasible plan, not asking too much of anyone, and yet giving all an opportunity of saying what he has to say.

Besides this the "Sat.u.r.day" would be glad to get Reviews from us.

If all those mentioned agree to join, we will meet somewhere and discuss plans.

Let me have a line to say what you think, and believe me, ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[In 1858 he read three papers at the Geological and two at the Linnean; he lectured (February 15) on Fish and Fisheries at South Kensington, and on May 21 gave a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Inst.i.tution on "The Phenomena of Gemmation." He wrote an article for "Todd's Cyclopaedia," on the "Tegumentary Organs," an elaborate paper, as Sir M.

Foster says, on a histological theme, to which, as to others of the same cla.s.s on the Teeth and the Corpuscular Tactus ("Q. J. Micr. Science"

1853-4), he had been "led probably by the desire, which only gradually and through lack of fulfilment left him, to become a physiologist rather than a naturalist."

No less important was his more general work for science. Physiological study in England at this time was dominated by transcendental notions.

To put first principles on a sound experimental basis was the aim of the new leaders of scientific thought. To this end Huxley made two contributions in 1858--one on the general subject of the cell theory, the other on the particular question of the development of the skull.

"In a striking 'Review of the Cell Theory,'" says Sir M. Foster, "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."

Of this article Professor E. Ray Lankester also writes:--

...Indeed it is a fundamental study in morphology. The extreme interest and importance of the views put forward in that article may be judged of by the fact that although it is forty years since it was published, and although our knowledge of cell structure has made immense progress during those forty years, yet the main contention of that article, namely that cells are not the cause but the result of organisation--in fact, are, as he says, to the tide of life what the line of sh.e.l.ls and weeds on the seash.o.r.e is to the tide of the living sea--is even now being re-a.s.serted, and in a slightly modified form is by very many cytologists admitted as having more truth in it than the opposed view and its later outcomes, to the effect that the cell is the unit of life in which and through which alone living matter manifests its activities.

The second was his Croonian Lecture of 1858, "On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," in which he demonstrated from the embryological researches of Rathke and others, that after the first step the whole course of development in the segments of the skull proceeded on different lines from that of the vertebral column; and that Oken's imaginative theory of the skull as modified vertebrae, logically complete down to a strict parallel between the subsidiary head-bones and the limbs attached to the spine, outran the facts of a definite structure common to all vertebrates which he had observed. ("Following up Rathke, he strove to subst.i.tute for the then dominant fantastic doctrines of the h.o.m.ologies of the cranial elements advocated by Owen, sounder views based on embryological evidence. He exposed the futility of attempting to regard the skull as a series of segments, in each of which might be recognised all the several parts of a vertebra, and pointed out the errors of trusting to superficial resemblances of shape and position. He showed, by the history of the development of each, that, though both skull and vertebral column are segmented, the one and the other, after an early stage, are fashioned on lines so different as to exclude all possibility of regarding the detailed features of each as mere modifications of a type repeated 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 ident.i.ty 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 modified skull.' This lecture marked an epoch in England in vertebrate morphology, and the views enunciated in it carried forward, if somewhat modified, as they have been, not only by Huxley's subsequent researches and by those of his disciples, but especially by the splendid work of Gegenbauer, are still, in the main, the views of the anatomists of to-day."--Sir M. Foster, Royal Society Obituary Notice of T.H. Huxley.)

With the demolition of Oken's theory fell the superstructure raised by its chief supporter, Owen, "archetype" and all.

It was undoubtedly a bold step to challenge thus openly the man who was acknowledged as the autocrat of science in Britain. Moreover, though he had long felt that on his own subjects he was Owen's master, to begin a controversy was contrary to his deliberate practice. But now he had the choice of submitting to arbitrary dictation or securing himself from further aggressions by dealing a blow which would weaken the authority of the aggressor. For the growing antagonism between him and Owen had come to a head early in the preceding year, when the latter, taking advantage of the permission to use the lecture-theatre at Jermyn Street for the delivery of a paleontological course, unwarrantably a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Professor of Paleontology at the School of Mines, to the obvious detriment of Huxley's position there. His explanations not satisfying the council of the School of Mines, Huxley broke off all personal intercourse with him.

CHAPTER 1.11.

1857-1858.

Throughout this period his health was greatly tried by the strain of his work and life in town. Headache! headache! is his repeated note in the early part of 1857, and in 1858 we find such entries as:--]

"February 11.--Used up. Hypochondrical and bedevilled."

"Ditto 12."

"13.--Not good for much."

"21.--Toothache, incapable all day."

[And again:--]

"March 30. Voiceless."

"31.--Missed lecture."

[And]

"April 1.--Unable to go out."

[He would come in thoroughly used up after lecturing twice on the same day, as frequently happened, and lie wearily on one sofa; while his wife, whose health was wretched, matched him on the other. Yet he would go down to a lecture feeling utterly unable to deliver it, and, once started, would carry it through successfully--at what cost of nervous energy was known only to those two at home.

But there was another branch of work, that for the Geological Survey, which occasionally took him out of London, and the open-air occupation and tramping from place to place did him no little good. Thus, through the greater part of September and October 1856 he ranged the coasts of the Bristol Channel from Weston to Clovelly, and from Tenby to Swansea, preparing a "Report on the Recent Changes of Level in the Bristol Channel."] "You can't think," [he writes from Braunton on October 3,]