Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
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Title: Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
Author: Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell
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[Illustration: THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY]
Leaders in Science
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK
BY
P. CHALMERS MITCHELL, M.A. (_Oxon._)
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK
27 WEST TWENTY THIRD STREET
LONDON
24 BEDFORD STREET STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1900
COPYRIGHT 1900
BY
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
This volume is in no sense an intimate or authorised biography of
Huxley. It is simply an outline of the external features of his life
and an account of his contributions to biology, to educational and
social problems, and to philosophy and metaphysics. In preparing it, I
have been indebted to his own Autobiography, to the obituary notice
written by Sir Michael Foster for the Royal Society of London, to a
sketch of him by Professor Howes, his successor at the Royal College
of Science, and to his published works. The latter consist of many
well-known separate volumes which are familiar to all zoölogists, and
of a vast number of memoirs and essays scattered in various scientific
and general publications. The general Essays were collected into nine
volumes, revised by himself in the later years of his life, and
published by Messrs. Macmillan. The Scientific Memoirs, thanks to the
generous enterprise of the same publishing firm, with which he was so
long associated, and to the pious labours of Sir Michael Foster and
Professor Ray Lankester, are in process of reissue in the form of four
volumes, two of which have now appeared. These will contain all his
important contributions to science, with the exception of a large
separate treatise on the _Oceanic Hydrozoa_ published by the Ray
Society in 1859. There is also announced a formal Biography, prepared
by his son, so that future admirers or students of Huxley's work will
be in an exceptionally favourable position.
LONDON, 1900.
P. CHALMERS MITCHELL.
Leaders in Science
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE iii
CHAPTER I
FROM SCHOOL TO LIFE-WORK 1
Birth--Parentage--School-days--Choice of Medical
Profession--Charing Cross Hospital--End of Medical
Studies--Admission to Naval Medical Service.
CHAPTER II
THE VOYAGE OF THE RATTLESNAKE 13
The Objects of the Voyage--The Route--The Naturalist and the
Surgeon--Collecting and Dredging--Stay in Sydney--Adventures with
the Natives--Comparison with Darwin's Voyage on the _Beagle_.
CHAPTER III
FLOATING CREATURES OF THE SEA 30
The Nature of Floating Life--Memoir on Medusæ Accepted by the
Royal Society--Old and New Ideas of the Animal Kingdom--What
Huxley Discovered in Medusæ--His Comparison of them with
Vertebrate Embryos
CHAPTER IV
EARLY DAYS IN LONDON 46
Scientific Work as Unattached Ship-Surgeon--Introduction to
London Scientific Society--Translating, Receiving, and
Lecturing--Ascidians--Molluscs and the Archetype--Criticism of
Pre-Darwinian Evolution--Appointment to Geological Survey.
CHAPTER V
CREATURES OF THE PAST 67
Beginning Palæontological Work--Fossil Amphibia and
Reptilia--Ancestry of Birds--Ancestry of the Horse--Imperfect
European Series Completed by Marsh's American Fossils--Meaning of
Geological Contemporaneity--Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism
Compared with Evolution in Geology--Age of the Earth--Intermediate
and Linear Types.
CHAPTER VI
HUXLEY AND DARWIN 89
Early Ideas on Evolution--Erasmus Darwin--Lamarck--Herbert
Spencer--Difference between Evolution and Natural
Selection--Huxley's Preparation for Evolution--The Novelty of
Natural Selection--The Advantage of Natural Selection as a Working
Hypothesis--Huxley's Unchanged Position with regard to Evolution
and Natural Selection from 1860 to 1894.
CHAPTER VII
THE BATTLE FOR EVOLUTION 110
Huxley's Prevision of the Battle--The Causes of the Battle--The
_Times_ Review--Sir Richard Owen attacks Darwinism in the
_Edinburgh Review_--Bishop Wilberforce attacks in the _Quarterly
Review_--Huxley's Scathing Replies--The British Association
Debates at Oxford--Huxley and Wilberforce--Résumé of Huxley's
Exact Position with Regard to Evolution and to Natural Selection.
CHAPTER VIII
VERTEBRATE ANATOMY 128
The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull--Goethe, Oken, Cuvier, and
Owen--Huxley Defends Goethe--His own Contributions to the
Theory--The Classification of Birds--Huxley Treats them as
"Extinct Animals"--Geographical Distribution--Sclater's
Regions--Huxley's Suggestions.
CHAPTER IX
MAN AND THE APES 144
Objections to Zoölogical Discussion of Man's Place--Owen's
Prudence--Huxley's Determination to Speak out--Account of his
Treatment of _Man's Place in Nature_--Additions Made by More
Recent Work.
CHAPTER X
SCIENCE AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION 167
Science-Teaching Fifty Years Ago--Huxley's Insistence on
Reform--Science Primers--Physiography--Elementary Physiology--_The
Crayfish_--Manuals of Anatomy--Modern Microscopical
Methods--Practical Work in Biological Teaching--Invention of the
Type System--Science in Medical Education--Science and Culture.
CHAPTER XI
GENERAL PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION 188
Establishment of Compulsory Education in England--The Religious
Controversy--Huxley Advocates the Bible without Theology--His
Compromise on the "Cowper-Temple" Clause--Influence of the New
Criticism--Science and Art Instruction--Training of
Teachers--University Education--The Baltimore Address--Technical
Education--So-called "Applied Science"--National Systems of
Education as "Capacity-Catchers."
CHAPTER XII
CITIZEN, ORATOR, AND ESSAYIST 204
Huxley's Activity in Public Affairs--Official in Scientific
Societies--Royal Commissions--Vivisection--Characteristics of his
Public Speaking--His Method of Exposition--His
Essays--Vocabulary--Phrase-Making--His Style Essentially One of
Ideas.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OPPONENT OF MATERIALISM 218
Science and Metaphysics--Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes--Existence of
Matter and Mind--Descartes's Contribution--Materialism and
Idealism--Criticism of Materialism--Berkeley's Idealism--Criticism
of Idealism--Empirical Idealism--Materialism as opposed to
Supernaturalism--Mind and Brain--Origin of Life--Teleology,
Chance, and the Argument from Design.
CHAPTER XIV
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT 232
Authority and Knowledge in Science--The Duty of Doubt--Authority
and Individual Judgment in Religion--The Protestant Position--Sir
Charles Lyell and the Deluge--Infallibility--The Church and
Science--Morality and Dogma--Civil and Religious
Liberty--Agnosticism and Clericalism--Meaning of
Agnosticism--Knowledge and Evidence--The Method of Agnosticism.
CHAPTER XV
THE BIBLE AND MIRACLES 245
Why Huxley Came to Write about the Bible--A _Magna Charta_ of the
Poor--The Theological Use of the Bible--The Doctrine of Biblical
Infallibility--The Bible and Science--The Three Hypotheses of the
Earth's History--Changes in the Past Proved--The Creation
Hypothesis--Gladstone on Genesis--Genesis not a Record of
Fact--The Hypothesis of Evolution--The New Testament--Theory of
Inspiration--Reliance on the Miraculous--The Continuity of Nature
no _a priori_ Argument against Miracles---Possibilities and
Impossibilities--Miracles a Question of Evidence--Praise of the
Bible.
CHAPTER XVI
ETHICS OF THE COSMOS 261
Conduct and Metaphysics--Conventional and Critical Minds--Good
and Evil--Huxley's Last Appearance at Oxford--The Ethical Process
and the Cosmic Process--Man's Intervention--The Cosmic Process
Evil--Ancient Reconciliations--Modern Acceptance of the
Difficulties--Criticism of Huxley's Pessimism--Man and his Ethical
Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.
CHAPTER XVII
CLOSING DAYS AND SUMMARY 275
Huxley's Life in London--Decennial
Periods--Ill-health--Retirement to Eastbourne--Death--Personal
Appearance--Methods of Work--Personal Characteristics--An Inspirer
of Others--His Influence in Science--A Naturalist by Vocation--His
Aspirations.
INDEX 287
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY--_From a photograph by
London Stereoscopic Company Frontispiece_
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, 1857--_Reproduced by
permission from "Natural Science," vol. vii.,
No. 42_ 64
SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER--_From a photograph
by Elliott and Fry, London_ 98
CHARLES DARWIN--_From the painting by Hon.
John Collier in the National Portrait Gallery_ 146
SIR CHARLES LYELL--_From a photograph by London
Stereoscopic Company_ 236
CARICATURE OF HUXLEY DRAWN BY HIMSELF--_Reproduced
by permission from "Natural
Science," vol. vii., No. 46._ 276
LIST OF HUXLEY'S WRITINGS
This list is offered, not as a bibliography in the technical sense,
but as an indication of the sources in which the vast majority of
Huxley's scientific and general work may be consulted most
conveniently.
_The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley_. Edited by Professor
Sir Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester; in four volumes.
London, Macmillan & Co.; New York, D. Appleton.
This magnificent collection is intended to contain all Huxley's
original scientific papers, brought together from the multitude
of scientific periodicals in which they appeared, with
reproductions of the original illustrations. The only exception
is the monograph on _Oceanic Hydrozoa_. The first volume appeared
in 1898; the second in 1899, and the others are to follow
quickly.
_Collected Essays by T.H. Huxley_; nine volumes of the Eversley
Series. Macmillan & Co. London, 1893-95.
This set, edited by Huxley himself, contains the more important
of his more general contributions to science and his literary,
philosophical, and political and critical essays. Each volume has
a preface specially written, and the first volume contains his
autobiography.
_The Oceanic Hydrozoa_; a description of the Calycophoridæ and
Physophoridæ observed during the Voyage of H.M.S. _Rattlesnake_ in the
years 1846-50, with a general introduction. Ray Society. London, 1859.
_Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature_. Williams & Norgate. London,
1863.
_On our Knowledge of the Causes of Organic Phenomena_; being Six
Lectures to Working Men. Hardwicke. London, 1863.
_Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy_. On the
Classification of Animals and the Vertebrate Skull. Churchill & Sons.
London, 1864.
_An Elementary Atlas of Comparative Osteology_. In twelve plates.
Williams & Norgate. London, 1864.
_Lessons in Elementary Physiology_. Macmillan & Co. London, 1866.
_An Introduction to the Classification of Animals_. Churchill. London,
1869.
_A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals_. Churchill. London,
1871.
_A Course of Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology_, assisted by
H.N. Martin. Macmillan. London, 1875.
_A Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals_. Churchill. London,
1877.
_Lay Sermons, Essays, and Reviews_. Macmillan. London, 1877.
_American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology_.
Macmillan. London, 1877.
_Physiography, an Introduction to the Study of Zoölogy_. International
Scientific Series. Kegan Paul. London, 1880.
_Introductory Primer_. Science Primers. Macmillan. London, 1880.
_The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_. Edited by his son, Francis
Darwin. Volume II., with Chapter V. by Professor Huxley on the
Reception of the _Origin of Species_. John Murray. London, 1887.
_Life of Richard Owen_. By his grandson. With an Essay on Owen's
Position in Anatomical Science, by T.H. Huxley. John Murray. London,
1894.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
CHAPTER I
FROM SCHOOL TO LIFE-WORK
Birth--Parentage--School-days--Choice of Medical
Profession--Charing Cross Hospital--End of Medical
Studies--Admission to Naval Medical Service.
Some men are born to greatness: even before their arrival in the world
their future is marked out for them. All the advantages that wealth
and the experience of friends can bring attend their growth to
manhood, and their success almost loses its interest because of the
ease with which it is attained. Few of the leaders of science were in
such a position: many of them, such as Priestley, Davy, Faraday, John
Hunter, and Linnæus were of humble parentage, and received the poorest
education: most of them, like Huxley himself, have come from parents
who were able to do little more for their children than set them out
into life along the ordinary educational avenues. In Huxley's boyhood
at least a comfortable income was necessary for this: in every
civilised country nowadays, state endowments, or private endowments,
are ready to help every capable boy, as far as Huxley was helped, and
in his progress from boyhood to supreme distinction, there is nothing
that cannot be emulated by every boy at school to-day. The minds of
human beings when they are born into the world are as naked as their
bodies; it matters not if parents, grandparents, and remoter ancestors
were unlettered or had the wisdom of all the ages, the new mind has to
build up its own wisdom from the beginning. We cannot even say with
certainty that children inherit mental aptitudes and capacities from
their parents; for as tall sons may come from short parents or
beautiful daughters from ugly parents, so we may find in the
capacities of the parents no traces of the future greatness of their
children. None the less it is interesting to learn what we can about
the parents of great men; and Huxley tells us that he thinks himself
to have inherited many characters of his body and mind from his
mother.
Thomas Henry Huxley was born on the 4th of May, 1825, at Ealing, then
a little country village, now united to London as a great suburb. He
was the seventh child of George Huxley, who was second master at the
school of Dr. Nicholson at Ealing. In these days private schools of
varying character were very numerous in England, and this
establishment seems to have been of high-class character, for Cardinal
Newman and many other distinguished men received part of their
education there. His mother, whose maiden name was Rachel Withers,
was, he tells us himself:[A]
"A slender brunette of an emotional and energetic temperament,
and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a
woman's head. With no more education than other women of the
middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity.
Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of
thought. If one ventured to suggest she had not taken much time
to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, 'I cannot help it.
Things flash across me.' That peculiarity has been passed on to
me in full strength: it has often stood me in good stead: it has
sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger.
But, after all, if my time were to come over again there is
nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of
'mother wit.'"
From his father he thinks that he inherited little except an inborn
capacity for drawing, "a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of
purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy." As it
happened, this natural gift for drawing proved of the greatest service
to him throughout his career. It is imperative that every investigator
of the anatomy of plants and animals should be able to sketch his
observations, and there is no greater aid to seeing things as they are
than the continuous attempt to reproduce them by pencil or brush.
Huxley was christened Thomas Henry, and he was unaware why these names
were chosen, but he humorously records the curious chance that his
parents should have chosen for him the "name of that particular
apostle with whom he had always felt most sympathy."
Of his childhood little is recorded. He remembers being vain of his
curls, and his mother's expressed regret that he soon lost the beauty
of early childhood. He attended for some time the school at Ealing
with which his father was associated, but he has little to say for the
training he received there. He writes:
"My regular school training was of the briefest, perhaps
fortunately: for, though my way of life has made me acquainted
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the
lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at
school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average lads
with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any
others; but the people who were set over us cared about as much
for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were
baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle for
existence among ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill
practices current among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence
in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a
battle which I had with one of my class-mates, who had bullied me
until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but
there was a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up
for my lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectually.
However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough and
ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of things in
general, arose out of the fact that _I_--the victor--had a black
eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into
disgrace and he did not. One of the greatest shocks I ever
received in my life was to be told, a dozen years afterwards by
the groom who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney,
that he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of family
misfortune to account for his position--but at that time it was
necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in
New South Wales, and on enquiry I found that the unfortunate
young man had not only been 'sent out,' but had undergone more
than one colonial conviction."
Huxley was soon removed from school and continued his own education
for several years, by reading of the most desultory sort. His special
inclinations were towards mechanical problems, and had he been able to
follow his own wishes there is little doubt but that he would have
entered on the profession of an engineer. It is probable that there
was a great deal more in his wishes than the familiar inclination of a
clever boy to engineering. All through the pursuit of anatomy, which
was the chief business of his life, it was the structure of animals,
the different modifications of great ground-plans which they
presented, that interested him. But the opportunity for engineering
did not present itself, and at an exceedingly early age he began to
study medicine. Two brothers-in-law were doctors, and this accidental
fact probably determined his choice. In these days the study of
medicine did not begin as now with a general and scientific education,
but the young medical student was apprenticed to a doctor engaged in
practice. He was supposed to learn the compounding of drugs in the
dispensary attached to the doctor's consulting-room; to be taught the
dressing of wounds and the superficial details of the medical craft
while he pursued his studies in anatomy under the direction of the
doctor. Huxley's master was his brother-in-law, Dr. Salt, a London
practitioner, and he began his work when only twelve or thirteen years
of age. In this system everything depended upon the superior; under
the careful guidance of a conscientious and able man it was possible
for an apt pupil to learn a great deal of science and to become an
expert in the treatment of disease. Huxley, however, had only a short
experience of this kind of training. He was taken by some senior
student friends to a post-mortem examination, and although then, as
all through his life, he was most sensitive to the disagreeable side
of anatomical pursuits, on this occasion he gratified his curiosity
too ardently. He did not cut himself, but in some way poisonous matter
from the body affected him, and he fell into so bad a state of health
that he had to be sent into the country to recruit. He lived for some
time at a farmhouse in Warwickshire with friends of his father and
slowly recovered health. From that time, however, all through his
life, he suffered periodically from prostrating dyspepsia. After some
months devoted to promiscuous reading he resumed his work under his
brother-in-law in London. He confesses that he was far from a model
student.
"I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it did
not,--which was a frequent case,--I was extremely idle (unless
making caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be called a
branch of industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong
directions. I read everything I could lay hands upon, including
novels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to drop them again
quite speedily."
It is almost certain, however, that Huxley underestimated the value of
this time. He stored his mind with both literature and science, and
laid the foundation of the extremely varied intellectual interests
which afterwards proved to him of so much value. It is certain, also,
that during this time he acquired a fair knowledge of French and
German. It would be difficult to exaggerate the value to him of this
addition to his weapons for attacking knowledge. To do the best work
in any scientific pursuit it is necessary to freshen one's own mind by
contact with the ideas and results of other workers. As these workers
are scattered over different countries it is necessary to transcend
the confusion of Babel and read what they write in their own tongues.
When Huxley was young, the great reputation of Cuvier overshadowed
English anatomy, and English anatomists did little more than seek in
nature what Cuvier had taught them to find. In Germany other men and
other ideas were to be found. Johannes Mueller and Von Baer were
attacking the problems of nature in a spirit that was entirely
different, and Huxley, by combining what he was taught in England with
what he learned from German methods, came to his own investigations
with a wider mind. But his conquest of French and German brought with
it advantages in addition to these technical gains. There is no reason
to believe that he troubled himself with grammatical details and with
the study of these languages as subjects in themselves. He acquired
them simply to discover the new ideas concealed in them, and he by no
means confined himself to the reading of foreign books on the subjects
of his own studies. He read French and German poetry, literature, and
philosophy, and so came to have a knowledge of the ideas of those
outside his own race on all the great problems that interest mankind.
A good deal has been written as to the narrowing tendency of
scientific pursuits, but with Huxley, as with all the scientific men
the present writer has known, the mechanical necessity of learning to
read other languages has brought with it that wide intellectual
sympathy which is the beginning of all culture and which is not
infrequently missed by those who have devoted themselves to many
grammars and a single literature. The old proverb, "Whatever is worth
doing is worth doing well," has only value when "well" is properly
interpreted. Although the science of language is as great as any
science, it is not the science of language, but the practical
interpretation of it, that is of value to most people, and there is
much to be said for the method of anatomists like Huxley, who passed
lightly over grammatical _minutiæ_ and went straight with a dictionary
to the reading of each new tongue.
After a short period of apprenticeship, or sometimes during the
course of it, the young medical students "walked" a hospital. This
consisted in attending the demonstrations of the physicians and
surgeons in the wards of the hospital and in pursuing anatomical,
chemical, and physiological study in the medical school attached to
the hospital. A large fee was charged for the complete course, but at
many of the hospitals there were entrance scholarships which relieved
those who gained them of all cost. In 1842 Huxley and his elder
brother, James, applied for such free scholarships at Charing Cross
Hospital. There is no record in the books of the hospital as to what
persons supported the application. The entry in the minutes for
September 6, 1842, states that
"Applications from the following gentlemen (including the two
sons of Mr. George Huxley, late senior assistant master in Ealing
School), were laid before the meeting, and their testimonials
being approved of, it was decided that those gentlemen should be
admitted as free scholars, if their classical attainments should
be found upon examination to be satisfactory."
It appears that the two Huxleys were able to satisfy the probably
unexacting demands of the classical examiners, for they began their
hospital work in October of the same year.
Those who know the magnificent laboratories and lecture-rooms which
have grown up in connection with the larger London hospitals must have
difficulty in realising the humble arrangements for teaching students
in the early forties. What endowments there were--and Charing Cross
was never a richly endowed hospital--were devoted entirely to the
hospital as opposed to the teaching school. There were no separate
buildings for anatomy, physiology, and so forth. At Charing Cross the
dissecting-room was in a cellar under the hospital, and subjects like
chemistry, botany, physiology, and so forth were crowded into
inconvenient side rooms. The teachers were not specialists, devoting
their whole attention to particular branches of science, but were
doctors engaged in practice, who, in addition to their private duties
and their work at the hospital, each undertook to lecture upon a
special scientific subject. Huxley came specially under the influence
of Mr. Wharton Jones, who had begun to teach physiology at the
hospital a year before. Mr. Jones throughout his life was engaged in
professional work, his specialty being ophthalmic surgery, but he was
a devoted student of anatomy and physiology, and made several
classical contributions to scientific knowledge, his best-known
discoveries relating to blood corpuscles and to the nature of the
mammalian egg-cell. But perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that it
was he who first imbued Huxley with a love for anatomical science and
with a knowledge of the methods of investigation. At the end of his
first session, in 1843, Huxley received the first prize in the senior
physiology class, while his brother got a "good conduct" prize. Of
Wharton Jones Huxley writes:
"The extent and precision of his knowledge impressed me greatly,
and the severe exactness of his method of lecturing was quite to
my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so much respect for
anybody as a teacher before or since. I worked hard to obtain his
approbation, and he was extremely kind and helpful to the
youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had
any right to do. It was he who suggested the publication of my
first scientific paper--a very little one--in the _Medical
Gazette_ of 1845, and most kindly corrected the literary faults
which abounded in it short as it was. For at that time, and for
many years afterwards, I detested the trouble of writing and
would take no pains over it."
This little paper, although Huxley deprecates it, was remarkable as
the work of so young an investigator. In it he demonstrated the
existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner root-sheath of
hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer.
There is no record in the minutes of the hospital school that Huxley
gained any other school prizes. His name reappears only in formal
applications at the beginning of each session for the renewal of his
free scholarship. In this respect he is in marked contrast to his
fellow-student, afterwards Sir Joseph Fayrer, who appears to have
taken almost every prize open to him. On the other hand, his
attainments in anatomy and physiology brought him distinction in a
wider field than the hospital school, for he obtained, in the
"honours" division of the first examination for the degree of Bachelor
of Medicine at the University of London, the second place with a
medal. And it is certain that he was far from neglecting his strictly
professional work, although, no doubt, he devoted much time to reading
and research in pure science, for in the winter of 1845-46, having
completed his course at the hospital, he was prepared to offer himself
at the examination for the membership of the Royal College of
Surgeons; but, being as yet under twenty-one years of age, could not
be admitted as a candidate.
It was now time for Huxley definitely to enter on his profession. He
would have preferred to continue his investigations in London and to
wait for the chance of a teaching post in physiology, but it was
necessary to earn a living. One of those whom he consulted was his
fellow-student, Joseph Fayrer, who, hailing from Bermuda, knew
something of those who go down to the sea in ships. He advised Huxley
to write to Sir William Burnett, at that time Director-General for the
medical service of the navy, for an appointment.
"I thought this rather a strong thing to do," says Huxley in his
autobiography, "as Sir William was personally unknown to me; but
my cheery friend would not listen to my scruples, so I went to my
lodgings and wrote the best letter I could devise. A few days
afterwards I received the usual official circular of
acknowledgement, but at the bottom was written an instruction to
call at Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked like
business, so, at the appointed time I called and sent in my card,
while I waited in Sir William's ante-room. He was a tall,
shrewd-looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch accent--and I
think I see him now as he entered with my card in his hand. The
first thing he did was to return it with the frugal reminder that
I should probably find it useful on some other occasion. The
second was to ask whether I was an Irishman. I suppose the air of
modesty about my appeal must have struck him. I satisfied the
Director-General that I was English to the backbone, and he made
some enquiries as to my student career, finally desiring me to
hold myself ready for examination. Having passed this, I was in
Her Majesty's service, and entered on the books of Nelson's old
ship, the _Victory_, for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple
of months after I made my application."
About the same time he passed the examination of the Royal College of
Surgeons and so became a fully qualified medical man. Haslar Hospital
was the chief naval hospital to which invalided sailors were sent.
There was a considerable staff of young surgeons, as navy surgeons
were usually sent for a term to work in the hospital before being
gazetted to a ship in commission. In connection with the hospital,
there was a museum of natural history containing a collection of
considerable importance slowly gathered from the gifts of sailors and
officers. The museum curator was an enthusiastic naturalist, and
Huxley must have had the opportunity of extending his knowledge of at
least the external characters of many forms of life hitherto unknown
to him. A few years later, the curator of the museum, with the help of
two of Huxley's successors, published a _Manual of Natural History for
the Use of Travellers_, and it is certain that Huxley at least did not
lose at Haslar any of the enthusiasm for zoölogy with which he had
been inspired at the Charing Cross Hospital. The chief of the hospital
was Sir John Richardson, an excellent naturalist, and well known as an
arctic explorer. He seems to have recognised the peculiar ability of
his young assistant, and although he was a silent, reserved man, who
seldom encouraged his assistants by talking to them, he made several
attempts to obtain a suitable post for Huxley. Such a post was that of
surgeon to H.M.S. _Rattlesnake_, then about to start under the command
of Captain Owen Stanley for surveying work in the Torres Straits.
Captain Stanley had expressed a wish for a surgeon who knew something
of science, and, on the recommendation of Sir John Richardson,
obtained the post for Huxley. There was, however, to be a special
naturalist attached to the expedition, but Huxley had the opportunity
he wanted. After a brief stay of seven months at the Haslar Hospital
he left it for his ship, and thus definitely entered on his work in
the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: This and many other details in this chapter are taken
from an autobiographical sketch in the first volume of Huxley's
collected essays published by Macmillan, London, 1894.]
CHAPTER II
THE VOYAGE OF THE "RATTLESNAKE"
The Objects of the Voyage--The Route--The Naturalist and the
Surgeon--Collecting and Dredging--Stay in Sydney--Adventures with
the Natives--Comparison with Darwin's Voyage on the _Beagle_.
Her Majesty's ship the _Rattlesnake_, one of the old class of 28-gun
ships, sailed from Plymouth for the Torres Straits and the Australian
seas on December 12, 1846. Her commander was Captain Owen Stanley, a
young but distinguished officer, the son of the Bishop of Norwich and
a brother of Dean Stanley, who afterwards played so great a part in
the social and religious history of England. She carried a complement
of 180 officers and men, and was attended by the _Bramble_ and the
_Castlereagh_, two small vessels of light draught, whose purpose was
to precede her in shallow waters. The young colonies of Australia were
developing commerce with the mother country, and the business of the
_Rattlesnake_ was to survey the waters round about the Torres Straits,
that the passage towards India on the homeward trip might be made
safer. Incidentally the vessel was to land a treasure of £50,000 at
the Cape of Good Hope, and another of £15,000 at the Mauritius. The
Admiralty Commissioners left full powers to Captain Stanley to carry
out the details of his mission according to his own judgment, but he
was solemnly warned upon two points. Many very unfortunate casualties
had occurred when sailors came in contact with the little-known
savages of the southern seas, and the Admiralty instructed him as
follows:
"In stretching off from the Barrier Reefs to the eastward, in
order to explore the safety of the sea intervening between them
and Louisiade and New Guinea, you will have occasion to approach
these shores, in which case you must constantly be on your guard
against the treacherous disposition of their inhabitants. All
barter for refreshments must be conducted under the eye of an
officer, and every pains be taken to avoid giving any just cause
of offence to their prejudices, especially with respect to their
women."
The second warning concerned grave international matters. European
politics were in the unsettled condition which, after the illusive
international courtesies of the Great Exhibition of 1851, ended in the
Crimean War, and it was feared that in the event of hostilities
breaking out, the zeal of the officers for their country might tempt
them to transcend their peaceful occupation. The instructions with
regard to this ran as follows:
"In the event of this country being involved in hostilities
during your absence, you will take care never to be surprised;
but you are to refrain from any act of aggression towards the
vessels or settlements of any nation with which we may be at war,
as expeditions employed on behalf of discovery and science have
always been considered by all civilised communities as acting
under a general safeguard."
The great scientific expeditions sent out in recent times by the
governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States, were fitted
with every convenience for the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries
and comforts of civilisation attended them round the world. The late
Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist on the English
_Challenger_ expedition, told the present writer of a pleasant way in
which a peculiarity of the deep sea was made to pay toll to the
comfort of those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over the
world, under the burning skies of the tropics, or below the arctic
ice-fields, are extremely cold, the water at the bottom always being
only a few degrees above freezing point. When the dredge brought up a
sample of the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was used to ice the
wine for the officers' mess. There was, however, no cooled champagne
for Huxley.
"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes,
"was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was
exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without
receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves.
In exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest
voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with
people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south
coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintances with a variety
of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from
experience of this kind, and the opportunities offered for
scientific work, to me personally the cruise was extremely
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to
be down on the realities of existence by living on bare
necessities; to find out how extremely well worth living life
seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank
with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole
prospect for breakfast; and more especially to learn to work for
the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went
to the bottom and I myself along with it. My brother officers
were as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are,
but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my
pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit
of the objects which my friends the middies christened 'Buffons,'
after the title conspicuous on a volume of the _Suites à Buffon_
which stood on my shelf in the chart-room."
Huxley was only the surgeon on board the _Rattlesnake_, and his
pursuit of natural history was his own affair. There was a special
naturalist appointed to the expedition, no doubt chosen because four
years earlier, as assistant to Professor Jukes, he had been attached
as naturalist to the expedition of the _Fly_ in the same waters. His
name was John MacGillivray, and he was the son of an exceedingly able
naturalist whose reputation has been overshadowed by the greater names
of the middle century. William MacGillivray, the father, sometime
professor at the University of Aberdeen, was one of those driven by an
almost instinctive desire to the study of nature. In his youth, when
he was a poor lad, desiring to see as much as possible of his native
land, and above all to visit the great museums and libraries of the
south, he walked from Aberdeen to London with no luggage but a copy of
Smith's _Flora Britannica_. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of
insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the anatomy of birds.
There are many curious allusions in his writings which seem to shew
that he too was beginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess
at the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which the
great Darwin was the first to make a part of the knowledge of the
world. It must be confessed that his son John, the companion of
Huxley, had little of his father's ability. He was three years older
than Huxley, and broke off his medical course at the University of
Edinburgh to sail in the _Fly_. After the return of the _Rattlesnake_,
he was appointed in 1852 as naturalist to H.M.S. _Herald_, then
starting under Captain Denham for surveying work round the shores of
South America. He left that ship at Sydney, and after many years'
wandering about the southern seas, accounts of which he communicated
from time to time to Sydney newspapers, he died in 1867. He was a
zealous collector of plants and animals, but apparently cared little
for the study of his captures, either in life, in relation to their
surroundings, like Darwin, or for the structure of their bodies, like
Huxley. The somewhat unpleasing nature of his regard for animals
appears in the following story which he himself tells:
"While at dinner off Darnley Island near the Torres Straits, news
was brought that Dzum was under the stern in a canoe, shouting
out loudly for Dzoka (MacGillivray's native name), and, on going
up I found that he had brought off the barit, which after a deal
of trouble I struck a bargain for and obtained. It was a very
fine specimen of Cuscus Maculatus, quite tame and kept in a large
cage of split bamboo. Dzum seemed very unwilling to part with the
animal, and repeatedly enjoined me to take great care of it and
feed it well, which to please him I promised to do, although I
valued it merely for its skin, and was resolved to kill it for
that purpose at my first convenience."
On the other hand, MacGillivray paid great attention to native
languages, and collected vocabularies of some value. To him was
entrusted the task of writing an account of the voyage, and it is from
his rather dull pages, brightened by illustrations from Huxley's
sketches, that the incidents of the voyage are taken. The references
to Huxley in the narrative are slight, and seem to shew that no great
intimacy existed between the two young men, the one a naturalist by
profession, the other as yet a surgeon, but more devoted to natural
history than the naturalist. Such references as occur relate to
Huxley's constant occupations on shore, sketching natives and their
dwellings, and his apparatus on board for trawling, dredging, and
dissecting.
The voyage out was uneventful. The ship touched at Madeira and at Rio
de Janeiro, and then crossed the South Atlantic to Simon's Town at the
Cape of Good Hope, where the first quantity of treasure was to be
landed. There they found the colony distressed by the long continuance
of the Kaffir war. Prices for everything were extortionate, and the
colonists had no mind for any affairs than their own, so after a short
stay the voyagers were glad to set out for the Mauritius. That island,
although in the possession of Britain, still retained a strong impress
of its French occupation, and the travellers were interested by the
mixture of population inhabiting it.[B]
"Passing through the closely packed lines of shipping, and
landing as a stranger at Port Louis, perhaps the first thing to
engage attention is the strange mixture of
nations,--representatives, he might at first be inclined to
imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a
coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and a soldier's jacket, or
a stately bearded Moor striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant.
A Chinaman with two bundles slung on a bamboo hurries past,
jostling a group of young Creole exquisites smoking their
cheroots at a corner, and talking of last night's Norma, or the
programme of the evening's performance at the Hippodrome in the
Champ de Mars. His eye next catches a couple of sailors reeling
out of a grogshop, to the amusement of a group of laughing
negresses, in white muslin dresses of the latest Parisian
fashion, contrasting strongly with a modestly attired Cingalese
woman, and an Indian ayah with her young charge. Amidst all this,
the French language prevails; and everything more or less
pertains of the French character, and an Englishman can scarcely
believe that he is in one of the colonies of his own country."
From Mauritius they proceeded to the English-looking colony of
Tasmania, and after a few days set out for Sydney, arriving there on
July 16th. The surveying officers had tedious work to do there, and
Huxley stayed in Sydney for three months. Then, and in the course of
three other prolonged stays in that town during the expedition, Huxley
entered into the society of the town and became a general favourite.
He is still remembered there, and the accompanying illustration[C] is
a copy of an original sketch of himself, now in the possession of an
Australian lady. He drew it on the fly-leaf of a volume of Lytton's
poems and presented it on her birthday to the little daughter of a
friend. At Sydney, too, he met and gained the love of the lady, then
Miss Henrietta A. Heathorn, who afterwards became his wife.
On October 11th the _Rattlesnake_ sailed northwards to begin the real
work of the expedition. The great island of New Guinea, lying to the
north of Australia, is separated from it only by the comparatively
narrow Torres Straits. Through these lies the natural route for the
commerce between Australia and the Northern Hemisphere. The eastward
prolongation of New Guinea, and the coast of Queensland, enclose
between them a great tropical sea which gradually converges to the
Straits. The waters are very tempestuous, and the navigation is made
more dangerous by the thousands of coral islands and coral reefs that
stud the ocean. Following the shoreline of Queensland, at a distance
of from ten to one hundred and fifty miles, and stretching for twelve
hundred and fifty miles, is the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one
of the wonders of the world. The shelving floor of the ocean rises
nearly to the surface along this line, and vast colonies of coral
building creatures have formed their reefs up to the water's edge
along the ridge. The turbulent waves scouring over this living mass
have carved and moulded it into millions of fantastic islands,
sometimes heaping detached masses of dead debris high above the
surface of the water. At low tide the most wonderful fields of the
animal flowers of the sea are exposed. Some of them form branching
systems of hard skeletons like stony trees, the soft, brightly
coloured animals dotted over the stems like buds. Others form solid
masses; others, again, rounded skull like boulders, or elevations like
toadstools. The colours of the skeletons and the animals are vivid
scarlets and purples and greens. Sea anemones, shell-fish, and
starfish of the most vivid hues are as abundant as the corals.
Brilliant fish dart through the blossoms of the marine gardens, and
sea birds scream and wheel in the air. The whole region is a paradise
for the naturalist. Along the seaward side of the reef the great ocean
surges and thunders perpetually. Between it and the shore the quiet
channel glows under the tropical skies. It was amid such scenes as
these that the _Rattlesnake_ moved for nearly four years in the slow
work of taking soundings, fixing the exact position of channels
through the outer reef by slow triangular measurements, and generally
preparing for the safety of the commerce of all nations. The ship went
first up to Port Curtis in Brisbane; then fetched back to Sydney. Its
next trip was south to the strait between Tasmania and Australia,
then back to Sydney; then again along the Barrier Reef right up to the
Torres Straits. After work there, it returned again to Sydney, and
then set out for the Louisiade Archipelago, which stretches through
the coral sea south-eastward from New Guinea; then again to the
Australian shores of the Torres Straits, and finally arrived in Sydney
in March, 1850, where the Captain suddenly died, and the ship was
ordered to return to England.
Throughout the voyage MacGillivray and Huxley busied themselves with
collecting animals on sea and on shore. MacGillivray seems to have
taken for his share of the spoil chiefly such animals as provided
shells or skins or skeletons suitable for handing over to museums.
Huxley occupied himself incessantly with dissecting tools and with the
microscope, with results to be described in a later chapter. The
better equipped expeditions of modern times were provided with
elaborate appliances for bringing up samples of living creatures from
all depths of the floor of the ocean, and with complicated towing nets
for securing the floating creatures of the surface of the seas. The
_Rattlesnake_ naturalists had to content themselves with simple
apparatus devised by themselves. At an early period of the voyage
attempts were made to take deep soundings, but no bottom was reached
at a depth of two thousand four hundred fathoms, and their later work
was confined to surface animals or to inshore dredging in shallow
waters. They began near Rio.
"None of the ship's boats could be spared, so I [MacGillivray]
hired one pulled by four negro slaves who, although strong,
active fellows, had great objections to straining their backs at
the oar, when the dredge was down. No sieve having been
supplied, we were obliged to sift the contents of the dredge
through our hands--a tedious and superficial mode of examination.
Two days after, Mr. Huxley and I set to work in Botafogo Bay,
provided with a wire-gauze meat-cover and a curious machine for
cleaning rice; these answered capitally as substitutes for
sieves, and enabled us, by a thorough examination of the contents
of the dredge, to detect some forty-five species of Mollusca and
Radiata, some of which were new to science."
By "new to science" MacGillivray meant no more than that the
particular genera and species had not been captured before. Huxley, by
his anatomical work, showed many of the most familiar creatures in a
light "new to science," by revealing their true structure and
relationships.
"Among the acquisitions," MacGillivray goes on, "I may mention a
new species of Amphioxus, a genus of small fishes exhibiting more
anomalies than any other known to Ichthyologists, and the lowest
organisation found in the class. It somewhat resembles the
sand-eels of Britain in habits, like them moving with
extraordinary rapidity through the sand. By dint of bribery and
ridicule we had at length managed to get our boatmen to work
tolerably well, and when we were alike well-roasted by the sun
and repeatedly drenched, besides being tired out and hungry, they
had become quite submissive, and exchanged their grumbling for
merriment."
The towing net repeatedly produced a rich harvest. It was constructed
by themselves, and consisted of a bag of the bunting used for flags,
two feet deep, the mouth being sewn round a wooden hoop fourteen
inches in diameter; three pieces of cord, a foot and a half long, were
secured to the hoop at equal intervals and had their ends tied
together. This net was towed behind the ship by a stout cord. The
water passed through the meshes of the cloth and left behind in the
pocket any small floating animals.
Excursions ashore to the little savage islands or to the mainland were
a source of constant interest, and it cannot be doubted that the
acquaintance Huxley thus gained with many of the very low savages of
Australia and New Guinea prepared his mind for the revolutionary
doctrine of descent which he embraced a few years later. At the
present time, there are probably very few parts of earth where there
are yet to be found savages unaltered by civilisation. Some of the low
races with which Huxley came in contact are now extinct. All the
survivors have come in contact with white races, and their habits and
customs have been altered. Before long the total extinction of these
lower races is to be expected, and there will then be left an enormous
gap between the lower animals and the dominant, aggressive, yellow and
white races which are spreading over the earth and making the lower
races perish before them, as the smaller but more cunning European rat
has exterminated the native brown rat of Australia. In their various
excursions upon the Australian mainland they had no trouble of any
kind with the natives. These were at first suspicious of the doings of
the white men, and their total ignorance of the use of firearms
tempted them to rashness; but a few friendly gifts, and the exercise
of tact in negotiating exchanges with them, made all the encounters
pass off pleasantly. On the other hand, in the Louisiade Archipelago
where the savages were of a higher type, difficulties constantly
occurred. On one occasion, in a bay on the south side of Joannet
Island the party was attacked.
"In the grey of the morning the look-outs reported the approach
of three canoes with about ten men in each. On two or three
persons shewing themselves in the bow of the pinnace, in front of
the rain awning, the natives ceased paddling, as if baulked in
their design of surprising the large boat; but, after a short
consultation, they came alongside in their usual noisy manner.
After a stay of about five minutes only they pushed off to the
galley, and some more sham bartering was attempted, but they had
nothing to give in exchange for the wares they so much coveted.
In a short time the rudeness and overbearing insolence of the
natives had risen to a pitch which left no doubt of their hostile
intentions. The anchor was got up, when some of the blacks seized
the painter, and others, in trying to capsize the boat, brought
the gunwale down to the water's edge, at the same time grappling
with the men to pull them out, and dragging the galley inshore
towards the shoal-water. The bowman, with the anchor in his hand,
was struck on the head with a stone-headed axe. The blow was
repeated, but fortunately took effect only on the wash-streak.
Another of the crew was struck at with a similar weapon, but
warded off the blow, although held fast by one arm, when, just as
the savage was making another stroke, Lieutenant Dayman, who up
till now had exercised the utmost forbearance, fired at him with
a musket. The man did not drop, although wounded in the thigh.
But even this, unquestionably their first experience of firearms,
did not intimidate the natives, one of whom, standing on a block
of coral, threw a spear which passed across the breast of one of
the boat's crew and lodged in the bend of one arm, opening a
vein. They raised a loud shout when the spear was seen to take
effect, and threw several others which missed. Lieutenant
Simpson, who had been watching what was going on, then fired from
the pinnace with buckshot and struck them, when, finding that the
large boat, though at anchor, could assist the smaller one, the
canoes were paddled inshore in great haste and confusion. Some
more musket shots were fired, and the galley went in chase
endeavouring to turn the canoes, so as to bring them under fire
of the pinnace's twelve-pounder howitzer, which was speedily
mounted and fired. The shot either struck one of the canoes or
went within a few inches of the mark, on which the natives
instantly jumped overboard into the shallow water, making for the
mangroves, which they succeeded in reaching, dragging their
canoes with them. Two rounds of grape-shot crashing through the
branches dispersed the party, but afterwards they moved two of
the canoes out of sight. The remaining one was brought out after
breakfast by the galley under cover of the pinnace, and was towed
off to some distance. The paddles having been taken out and the
spears broken and left in her, she was let go to drift down
toward a village whence the attacking party were supposed to have
come. Some blood in this canoe, although not the one most aimed
at, showed that the firing had not been ineffective. This act of
deliberate treachery was perpetrated by persons who had always
been well treated by us, for several of the natives present were
recognised as having been alongside the ship in Coral Haven.
This, their first act of positive hostility, affords, I think,
conclusive evidence of the savage disposition of the natives of
this part of the Louisiade Archipelago when incited by the hope
of plunder, and shews that no confidence should ever be reposed
in them, unless, perhaps in the presence of a numerically
superior force, or in the close vicinity of a ship. At the same
time, the boldness of these savages in attacking, with thirty men
in three canoes, two boats known to contain at least twenty
persons--even in the hopes of taking them by surprise--and in not
being at once driven off upon feeling the novel and deadly
effects of firearms, shews no little amount of bravery."
On their last visit to Cape York, in the extreme north of Australia,
the party had the remarkable experience of rescuing a white woman from
captivity among the natives.
"In the afternoon some of our people on shore were surprised to
see a young white woman come up to claim their protection from a
party of natives from whom she had recently made her escape, and
who she thought would otherwise bring her back. Of course she
received every attention, and was taken on board the ship by the
first boat, when she told her story which is briefly as follows:
Her name is Barbara Thomson. She was born at Aberdeen in
Scotland, and, along with her parents, emigrated to New South
Wales. About four years and a half ago she left Moreton Bay with
her husband in a small cutter, called the _America_, of which he
was the owner, for the purpose of picking up some of the oil from
the wreck of a whaler, lost on the Bampton shoal, to which place
one of her late crew undertook to guide them; their ultimate
intention was to go on to Port Essington. The man who acted as
pilot was unable to find the wreck, and after much quarreling on
board in consequence, and the loss of two men by drowning and of
another who was left on a small uninhabited island, they made
their way up to the Torres Straits, where, during a gale of wind
their vessel struck upon a reef on the eastern Prince of Wales
Island. The two remaining men were lost in attempting to swim on
shore through the surf, but the woman was afterwards rescued by a
party of natives on a turtling excursion, who, when the gale
subsided, swam on board and supported her on shore between two of
their number. One of these blacks, Boroto by name, took
possession of the woman as his share of the plunder; she was
compelled to live with him, but was well treated by all the men,
although many of the women, jealous of the attention shewn her,
for a long time evinced anything but kindness. A curious
circumstance secured for her the protection of one of the
principal men of the tribe. This person, acting upon the belief,
universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres
Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the
ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he
recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into
the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between
them. She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one
of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives
of all denominations. The headquarters of the tribe being on an
island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from
the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the
mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go
through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so
as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape. Last
year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty
miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us
and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and
watched her even more narrowly than before. On our second and
present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately
announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful
in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her
across to the mainland within a short distance of where the
vessels lay. The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as
she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she
did not intend to leave them,--only 'she felt a strong desire to
see the white people once more and shake hands with them': adding
that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco,
and other much-prized articles."
Although the external adventures of the _Rattlesnake_ party were less
varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four
years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental
adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of
the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great
university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a
mere student, capricious and unsettled in his mental tastes and
inclinations, but had set his face steadily towards his future
life-work. It is interesting to compare the importance in Huxley's
life of the _Rattlesnake_ voyage with the importance in Darwin's life
of the voyage on the _Beagle_ undertaken some fifteen years earlier.
Huxley, when he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vague
kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of structure of
different animals revealed by the knife and the microscope. Day after
day, month after month, year after year, in the abundant leisure his
slight professional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dissected
and drew, animal after animal, as he got them from the dredge or
tow-net, or from the surface of the coral reefs. He was not in any
sense of the word a collecting naturalist. The identification and
naming of species interested him little. What he cared for was, he
tells us, "the architectural and engineering part of the business: the
working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and
thousands of divers living constructions, and the modifications of
similar apparatuses to serve different ends." And so, on the
_Rattlesnake_, and in his work in continuation of the _Rattlesnake_
investigations,--which occupied most of his time for a few years after
his return to London,--there was gradually growing up in his mind a
dim conception of the animal kingdom as a group of creatures, not
built on half a dozen or more separate plans or types, each
unconnected with the other, but as a varied set of modifications of a
single type.
When Darwin set out on the _Beagle_, unlike Huxley, he was an
enthusiastic collecting naturalist. He had wandered from county to
county in England adding new specimens to his collections of
butterflies and beetles. As the _Beagle_ went round the world visiting
remote islands, far from land in the centre of the waters,
archipelagoes of islands crowding together, islands hugging the shore
of continents, and the great continents of the old and new worlds, he
continued to collect and to classify. Gradually the resemblances and
differences between the creatures inhabiting different parts of the
earth began to strike him as exhibiting an orderly plan. He saw that
under apparently the same conditions of food and temperature and
moisture, in different parts of the world the genera and species were
different, and that they were most alike in regions between which
there was the most recent chance of migrations having taken place. In
the quietness of England, while Huxley was on the _Rattlesnake_,
Darwin was slowly working towards the explanation of all he had seen:
towards the conception that animals and plants had spread slowly from
common centres, becoming more and more different from each other as
they spread. He realised on his voyage that species had come into
existence by descent with modification, and before long he was to
publish to the world in the _Origin of Species_ a vast and convincing
bulk of evidence as to the actual fact of a common descent for all the
different existing organisms, and, in his theory of natural selection,
a reasonable explanation of how the fact of evolution had come about.
Darwin's greatest ally in bringing the new idea before the world was
Huxley, and Huxley was teaching himself the absolute unity of the
living world. The two men were dissimilar in tastes and temperament,
and they were at work on quite different sides of nature. When the
time came, Huxley, with his commanding knowledge of the structure of
animals, was ready to support Darwin and to illustrate and amplify his
arguments by a thousand anatomical proofs. It is a curious and
dramatic coincidence to realise that both men learned their very
different lessons under very similar circumstances in the tropical
seas of the Southern Hemisphere.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote B: _Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. "Rattlesnake_," by
John MacGillivray, F.R.G.S. 2 vols. T.W. Boone, London, 1852.]
[Footnote C: This sketch was reproduced and described in _Natural
Science_, vol. vii., p. 381, and is now reproduced here by the
courtesy of the proprietors.]
CHAPTER III
FLOATING CREATURES OF THE SEA
The Nature of Floating Life--Memoir on Medusæ Accepted by the
Royal Society--Old and New Ideas of the Animal Kingdom--What
Huxley Discovered in Medusæ--His Comparison of them with
Vertebrate Embryos.
As the _Rattlesnake_ sailed through the tropical seas Huxley came in
contact with the very peculiar and interesting inhabitants of the
surface of the sea, known now to naturalists as pelagic life or
"plankton." Although a poet has spoken of the "unvintageable sea," all
parts of the ocean surface teem with life. Sometimes, as in high
latitudes, the cold is so great that only the simplest microscopic
forms are able to maintain existence. In the tropics, animals and
plants are abundant, and sometimes by their numbers colour great areas
of water; or, as in the drift of the Gulf Stream, make a tangle of
animal and plant life through which a boat travels only with
difficulty. The basis of the food supply of this vast and hungry
floating life is, as on land, vegetable life; for plants are the only
creatures capable of building up food from the gases of the air and
the simple chemical salts found dissolved in water. Occasionally, in
shallow or warm seas, marine floating plants, large and visible like
the sea-weeds of the coast, form the floating masses known as Sargasso
seas; more often the plants are minute, microscopic specks visible
only when a drop of water is placed under the microscope, but
occurring in incredible numbers, and, like the green vegetation of the
earth, forming the ultimate food-supply of all the living things
around them. Innumerable animals, great and small, live on the plants
or upon their fellows, and, however far he may be from land, the
naturalist has always abundant material got by his daily use of the
tow-net. This drifting population floats at the mercy of the waves.
Most of the animals are delicate, transparent creatures, their
transparency helping to protect them from the attacks of hungry
fellows. Nerves, muscles, skin, and the organs generally are clear,
pale, and hardly visible. Such structures as the liver, the
reproductive organs, and the stomach, which cannot easily become
transparent, are grouped together into small knots, coloured brown
like little masses of sea-weed. Other floating creatures are vividly
coloured, but the hues are bright blues and greens closely similar to
the sparkling tints of sea-water in sunlight. The different members of
this marine flotsam frequently rise and fall periodically: some of
them sinking by day to escape the light, others rising only by day;
others, again, appearing on the surface in spring, keeping deep down
in winter. Perhaps the majority of them are phosphorescent, sometimes
shining by their own light, sometimes borrowing a glory from
innumerable phosphorescent bacteria with which they are infested.
Nearly every class of the animal kingdom contributes members to this
strange population. The young forms of many fish, as for instance of
conger, flying gurnards, and some flatfish, are pelagic and have
colourless blood, and pale, transparent, gelatinous or cartilaginous
skeletons. The tadpole-like stages of the sea-squirts, which in adult
life are to be found attached to rocks like weeds, drift about in the
surface waters until their time comes for settling down in life. Many
other Ascidians pass their whole life as pelagic creatures. A few
molluscs, many kinds of worms, echinoderms, and their allies, crab and
lobster-like creatures in innumerable different stages of development,
are to be found there, while unnumbered polyps and jelly-fish are
always present. It would be difficult to imagine a better training for
the naturalist than to spend years, as Huxley did, working at this
varied assortment of living creatures. Huxley declared that the
difficulties of examining such flimsy creatures had been exaggerated.
"At least, with a good light and a good microscope, with the ship
tolerably steady, I never failed in procuring all the information
I required. The great matter is to obtain a good successive
supply of specimens, as the more delicate oceanic species are
usually unfit for examination within a few hours after they are
taken."
Day after day, as the _Rattlesnake_ crept from island to island,
Huxley examined the animals brought up by his tow-net. He made endless
dissections, and gradually accumulated a large portfolio of drawings.
Much of the time he passed at Sydney was spent in libraries and
museums, comparing his own observations with the recorded observations
of earlier workers, and receiving from the combination of his own work
and the work of others new ideas for his future investigations. It was
all entirely a labour of love; it lay outside the professional duties
by which he made his living, and for a long time it seemed as if he
was not even to gain reputation by the discoveries he knew himself to
be making. He writes in his autobiography:
"During the four years of our absence, I sent home communication
after communication to the 'Linnæan' Society, with the same
result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of his
ark. Tired at last of hearing nothing about them, I determined to
do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and
forwarded it to the Royal Society. This was my dove, if I had
only known it; but owing to the movements of the ship I heard
nothing of that either until my return to England in the latter
end of the year 1850, when I found that it was printed and
published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me.
When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy
and encouragement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was
not the least valuable part of my education."
This first successful paper was a memoir _On the Anatomy and the
Affinities of the Family of Medusæ_, and was sent at Captain Stanley's
suggestion to that officer's father, the Bishop of Norwich, who
communicated it to the Royal Society. It is a curious circumstance
that Huxley, who afterwards met with so virulent opposition from
bishops, owed his first public success to one of them. Professor Sir
Michael Foster writes of this period in Huxley's life:
"The career of many a successful man has shewn that obstacles
often prove the mother of endeavour, and never was this lesson
clearer than in the case of Huxley. Working amidst a host of
difficulties, in want of room, in want of light, seeking to
unravel the intricacies of minute structure with a microscope
lashed to secure steadiness, cramped within a tiny cabin, jostled
by the tumult of a crowded ship's life, with the scantiest supply
of books of reference, with no one at hand of whom he could take
counsel on the problems opening up before him, he gathered for
himself during these four years a large mass of accurate,
important, and in most cases novel, observations and illustrated
them with skilful, pertinent drawings. Even his intellectual
solitude had its good effects: it drove him to ponder over the
new facts which came before him, and all his observations were
made alive with scientific thought."
Afterwards, in England, he received the Royal Medal of the Royal
Society for this memoir on Medusæ, sharing this supreme distinction of
scientific England with men so illustrious as Joule, the discoverer of
the relation between force and heat, Stokes, the great investigator of
optical physics, and Humboldt, the traveller, all of whom received
medals in the same year. In making the presentation to Huxley, the
Earl of Rosse, then President of the Royal Society, declared:
"In those papers you have for the first time fully developed
their structure (that of the Medusæ), and laid the foundation of
a rational theory for their classification. In your second paper,
on the anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma, the phenomena have received
the most ingenious and elaborate elucidations, and have given
rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely
yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon
some of the most abstruse points of what may be called
transcendental physiology."
Many reasons make it difficult for us to realise, now, the singular
novelty and importance of Huxley's memoir on the Medusæ. The first is
a reason which often prevents great discoveries in almost every
subject from receiving in after years their due respect. The years
that have passed since 1850 have seen not only the most amazing
progress in our knowledge of comparative anatomy, but almost a
revolution in the methods of studying it. Huxley's work has been
incorporated in the very body of science. A large number of later
investigators have advanced upon the lines he laid down; and just as
the superstructures of a great building conceal the foundations, so
later anatomical work, although it has only amplified and extended
Huxley's discoveries, has made them seem less striking to the modern
reader. The present writer, for instance, learned all that he knows of
anatomy in the last ten years, and until he turned to it for the
purpose of this volume he had never referred to Huxley's original
paper. When he did so, he found from beginning to end nothing that was
new to him, nothing that was strange: all the ideas in the memoir had
passed into the currency of knowledge and he had been taught them as
fundamental facts. It was only when he turned to the text-books of
anatomy and natural history current in Huxley's time that he was able
to realise how the conclusions of the young ship-surgeon struck the
Fellows and President of the Royal Society as luminous and
revolutionary ideas.
In the first half of the century, a conception of the animal kingdom
prevailed which was entirely different from our modern ideas. We know
now that all animals are bound together by the bond of a common
descent, and we seek in anatomy a clue to the degrees of relationship
existing among the different animals we know. We regard the animal
kingdom as a thicket of branches all springing from a common root.
Some of these spring straight up from the common root unconnected with
their fellows. Others branch repeatedly, and all the branches of the
same stem have features in common. What we see in the living world is
only the surface of the thicket, the tops of the twigs; and it is by
examination of the structure of this surface that we reconstruct in
imagination the whole system of branches, and know that certain twigs,
from their likeness, meet each other a little way down; that others
are connected only very deep down, and that others, again, spring
free almost from the beginning. The fossils of beds of rock of
different geological ages give us incomplete views of the surface of
the thicket of life, as it was in earlier times. These views we have
of the past aspects of the animal kingdom are always much more
incomplete than our knowledge of the existing aspect; partly because
many animals, from the softness of their bodies, have left either no
fossil remains at all, or only very imperfect casts of the external
surfaces of their bodies; and partly because the turning of any animal
into a fossil, and its subsequent discovery by a geologist, are
occasional accidents; but, although the evidence is much less perfect
than we could wish, there is enough of it to convince anatomists that
existing animals are all in definite blood-relationship to each other,
and to make them, in the investigation of any new animal, study its
anatomy with the definite view of finding out its place in the family
tree of the living world.
When Huxley made his first discoveries, entirely different ideas
prevailed. The animal kingdom was supposed to offer a series of types,
of moulds, into which the Creator at the beginning of the world had
cast the substance of life. These types were independent of each
other, and had been so since the beginning of things. Anatomists were
concerned chiefly with systematic work, with detecting and recording
the slight differences that existed among the numbers of animals
grouped around each type. No attempt was made to see connection
between type and type, for where these had been separately created
there was nothing to connect them except possibly some idea in the
mind of the Creator. This apparently barren attitude to nature was
stronger in men's minds because it had inspired the colossal
achievements of Cuvier, a genius who, under whatever misconceptions he
had worked, would have added greatly to knowledge. As we have seen in
the first chapter, Huxley, through Wharton Jones, and through his own
reading, had been brought under the more modern German thought of
Johannes Mueller and Von Baer. He had learned to study the problems of
living nature in the spirit of a physicist making investigations into
dead nature. In the anatomy of animals, as in the structure of rocks
and crystals, there were to be sought out "laws of growth" and shaping
and moulding influences which accounted for the form of the
structures. To use the technical term, he was a morphologist: one who
studied the architecture of animals not merely in a spirit of admiring
wonder, but with the definite idea of finding out the guiding
principles which had determined these shapes.
Not only was the prevailing method of investigation faulty, but actual
knowledge of a large part of the animal kingdom was extremely limited.
In the minds of most zoölogists the animal kingdom was divided into
two great groups: the vertebrates and invertebrates. The vertebrate,
or back-boned, animals were well known; comparatively speaking they
are all built upon the type of man; and human anatomists, who indeed
made up the greater number of all anatomists, using their exact
knowledge of the human body, had studied many other vertebrates with
minute care, and, from man to fishes, had arranged living vertebrates
very much in the modern order. But the invertebrates were a vague and
ill-assorted heap of animals. It was not recognised that among them
there were many series of different grades of ascending complexity,
and there was no well-known form to serve as a standard of comparison
for all the others in the fashion that the body of man served as a
standard of comparison for all vertebrates. Here and there, a few
salient types such as insects and snails had been picked out, but
knowledge of them helped but little with a great many of the
invertebrates. The great Linnæus had divided the animal kingdom into
four groups of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, but
for the invertebrates he had done no more than to pick out the insects
as one group and to call everything else "Vermes" or worms. The
insects included all creatures possessed of an external skeleton or
hard skin divided into jointed segments, and included forms so
different as insects, spiders, crabs, and lobsters. But Vermes
included all the members of the animal kingdom that were neither
vertebrates nor insects. Cuvier advanced a little. He got rid of the
comprehensive title Vermes--the label of the rubbish-heap of
zoölogists. He divided animals into four great subkingdoms:
Vertebrates, Mollusca, Articulata, Radiata. These names, however, only
covered very superficial resemblances among the animals designated by
them. The word _Mollusca_ only meant that the creatures grouped
together had soft bodies, unsupported by internal or external
articulated skeletons; and this character, or, rather, absence of
character, was applied alike to many totally dissimilar creatures. The
term _Articulata_ included not only Linnæus's insects but a number of
soft-skinned, apparently jointed, worm-like animals such as the leech
and earthworm. Lastly, the name _Radiata_ meant no more than that the
organs of the creatures so designated were more or less disposed
around a centre, as the sepals and petals of a flower are grouped
around the central pistil; and it included animals so different as
the starfish and sea-anemones and Medusæ. The names used in the
classification were not only loosely applied but were based on the
most superficial observation, and took no account of the intimate
structures of the tissues and organs of the animals. With slight
modifications, due to individual taste or special knowledge of small
groups, later writers had followed Linnæus and Cuvier.
It was with a view of the animal kingdom not much clearer than this
that Huxley began his work on the Medusæ of the tropic seas. He began
to study them no doubt simply because they were among the most
abundant of the animals that could be obtained from the ship. He made
endless dissections and drawings, and, above all, studied their minute
anatomy with the microscope. They were all placed among Cuvier's
_Radiata_, but, as Huxley said in the first line of his memoir:
"Perhaps no class of animals has been investigated with so little
satisfactory and comprehensive result, and this not for the want
of patience and ability on the part of the observers, but rather
because they have contented themselves with stating matters of
detail concerning particular genera and species, instead of
giving broad and general views of the whole class, considered as
organised upon a given type, and inquiring into its relations
with other families."
He found that fully developed Medusæ consisted each of a disc with
tentacles and vesicular bodies at the margins, a stomach, and canals
proceeding from it, and generative organs. He traced this simple
common structure through the complications and modifications in which
it appeared in the different groups of Medusæ, in all this work
bringing out the prevailing features of the anatomy in contrast to
the individual peculiarities. He shewed that microscopically all the
complicated systems of canals and organs were composed of two
"foundation-membranes," two thin webs of cells, one of which formed
the outermost layer of the body, while the inner formed the lining of
the stomach and canals in the thinner parts of the body, such as the
edges of the umbrella-like disc, and towards the ends of the
tentacles. These thin webs formed practically all the body. In the
thicker parts there was interposed between them an almost
structureless layer of jelly, placed like padding between the lining
and the cloth of a coat. He shewed that blood-vessels and blood were
absent, in which he has been confirmed by all other observers. He
declared more doubtfully against the existence of a special nervous
system, and it was not until long after, when the methods of
microscopic investigation were much more perfect, that the delicate
nerve-cells and nerve-fibres, which we now know to exist, were
discovered.
Having thus shewn the peculiar organisation of the group he turned to
seek out its allies among other families. The Medusæ consisted
essentially of two membranes inclosing a variously shaped cavity
inasmuch as all its organs were so composed. The generative organs
were external, being variously developed processes of the two
membranes. The peculiar organs called thread-cells--poisoned darts by
the discharge of which prey could be paralysed--were universally
present. What other families presented these peculiarities?
There are to be found abundantly in sea-water, and less frequently in
fresh water, innumerable forms of animal life called Zoöphytes or
animal plants because they occur as encrusting masses like lichens, or
branched forests like moss, on the surface of stones and shells. A
common habit gave this set of creatures their common name; but,
although they were grouped together, there was no greater affinity
among them than there is racial affinity among people who clothe
themselves for an evening party in the same conventional dress. Huxley
examined a large number of these, and picked out from them two great
families of polyps, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, which each
consist of colonies of creatures very much like the little fresh-water
hydra. He shewed that the tubular body of these and the ring of
tentacles surrounding the mouth were composed of the same two
foundation-membranes of which all the organs of Medusæ are composed.
He found in them the poisoned arrows or thread-cells of the Medusæ,
and the same external position of the reproductive organs. And,
lastly, he separated from all other creatures, and associated with his
new group, some of the strangest and most beautiful animals of the
tropic seas, known to science as the Physophoridæ and the Diphyidæ.
The best-known of these is the "Portuguese man-of-war," the body of
which consists of a large pear-shaped vesicle which floats on the
water like a bladder. From the lower part of this depend into the
water large and small nutritive branches, each ending in a mouth
surrounded by a circle of waving tentacles armed with batteries of
thread-cells, while another set of hanging protrusions bear the
grape-like reproductive organs. On the upper surface of the bladder is
fixed a purple sail of the most brilliant colour, by which the
floating creature is blown through the water. When the weather is
rough, the bladder empties, and the creature sinks down into the quiet
water below the waves, to rise again when the storm is over. This,
and its equally wonderful allies, Huxley showed to be a complicated
colony of hydra-like creatures, each part being composed of two
membranes, and therefore essentially similar to Medusæ. Thus, by a
great piece of constructive work, an assemblage of animals was
gathered into a new group and shewn to be organised upon one simple
and uniform plan, and, even in the most complex and aberrant forms,
reducible to the same type. The group, and Huxley's conception of its
structure, are now absolutely accepted by anatomists, and have made
one of the corner-stones of our modern idea of the arrangement of the
animal kingdom. With the exception of sponges, concerning the exact
relations of which there is still dispute, and of a few sets of
parasitic and possibly degenerate creatures, all animals, the bodies
of which are multicellular, from the simple fresh-water hydra up to
man, are divided into two great groups. The structure of the simpler
of these groups is exactly what Huxley found to be of importance in
the Medusæ. The body wall, from which all the organs protrude,
consists merely of a web of cells arranged in two sheets or membranes,
and the single cavity consists of a central stomach, surrounded by
these membranes, the cavity remaining simple or giving rise to a
number of branching canals. The members of this great division of the
animal kingdom are the creatures which Huxley selected and placed
together, with the addition of the sea-anemones and the medusa-like
Ctenophora, which, indeed, he mentioned in his memoir as being related
to the others, but reserved fuller consideration for a future
occasion. This group is now called the Coelenterata, the name
implying that the creatures are simply hollow stomachs, and it is
contrasted in the strongest way with the group Coelomata, in which
are placed all the higher animals, from the simplest worm up to man;
animals in which, in addition to the two foundation-membranes of the
Coelenterata, there is a third foundation-membrane, and in which, in
addition to the simple stomach cavity with its offshoots, there is a
true body-cavity or coelome, and usually a set of spaces and
channels containing a blood-fluid. The older method of naming groups
of animals after some obvious superficial character lingered on for
some years in text-books and treatises, but in this memoir the young
ship-surgeon had replaced it by the modern scientific method of
grouping animals together only because of real identity of structure.
There is yet left to be noticed perhaps the most wonderful of all the
ideas in this first memoir by Huxley. In the course of describing the
two foundation membranes of the Medusæ he remarks:
"It is curious to remark, that throughout, the outer and inner
membranes appear to bear the same physiological relation to one
another as do the serous and mucous layers of the germ: the outer
becoming developed into the muscular system, and giving rise to
the organs of offence and defence: the inner on the other hand
appearing to be more closely subservient to the purposes of
nutrition and generation."
In the whole range of science it would be difficult to select an
utterance more prophetic of future knowledge than these few words.
Huxley had been reading the investigations of Von Baer into the early
development of back-boned animals. He had learned from them the great
generalisation, that the younger stages of these animals resemble one
another more closely than the adult stages, and that in an early stage
in the development of all these animals the beginning of the embryo
consists of two layers of cells, in fact of two foundation-membranes,
one forming specially the wall of the future digestive canal, the
other forming the most external portion of the future animal. In these
days nothing could have seemed a remoter or more unlikely comparison
than one instituted between Medusæ and the embryonic stages of
back-boned animals. But Huxley made it, not allowing the evidence
brought before his reason to be swamped by preconceived ideas. At the
time he did no more than to make the comparison. It was much later
that the full importance of it became known, when more extended work
on the embryology of vertebrates and of the different groups of the
invertebrates had made it plain that the two foundation-membranes of
Huxley occur in all animals from the Medusæ up to man. In the group of
Coelenterata the organisation remains throughout life as nothing
more than a folding in and folding out of these membranes. The early
stages of all the higher animals similarly consist of complications of
the two membranes; but later on there is added to them a third
membrane. Thus the group that Huxley gathered together comprises those
animals that as adults remain in a condition of development which is
passed through in the embryonic life of all higher animals. The
immense importance of this conclusion becomes plain, and the
conclusion itself seems obvious, when seen in the light of the
doctrine of descent. The group of Coelenterata represents a
surviving, older condition in the evolution of animals. Huxley
himself, when on the _Rattlesnake_, regarded evolution only as a vague
metaphysical dream, and he made the comparison which has been
described without any afterthought of what it implied. In this we have
the earliest authentic instance of the peculiar integrity of mind
which was so characteristic of him in his dealings with philosophy and
tradition. He never allowed any weight of authority or any apparent
disturbance of existing ideas to alter the conclusions to which his
reason led him. This intellectual courage made him fitted to be the
leader in the battle for evolution and against traditional thought,
and we shall find again and again in consideration of his work that it
was the keynote of his life.
CHAPTER IV
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.
CHAPTER V
CREATURES OF THE PAST
Beginning Palæontological Work--Fossil Amphibia and
Reptilia--Ancestry of Birds--Ancestry of the Horse--Imperfect
European Series Completed by Marsh's American Fossils--Meaning of
Geological Contemporaneity--Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism
Compared with Evolution in Geology--Age of the
Earth--Intermediate and Linear Types.
Although Huxley took a post connected with Geology only because it was
the most convenient opening for him, it was not long before he became
deeply interested not only in the fossils, which at first he despised,
but in the general problems of geology. He began by co-operation with
Mr. Salter in the determination of fossils for the Geological Survey.
The mere work of defining genera and species and naming and describing
new species appealed very little to him. He had none of the
collector's passion for new species; his interest in a creature being
not whether or no it was new to science, but what general problems of
biology its structure helped to elucidate. While he assisted in the
routine work of determining the zoölogical position of the fossils
sent in to the museum by the Survey, he carried investigations much
farther than the duties of the post required when interesting
zoölogical problems arose. His earliest notes were written in
association with his colleague, and consisted of technical
descriptions of some small fossils from the Downton Sandstones which
were supposed to be fish-shields. The peculiarities of structure
presented by these aroused his interest, and he began an elaborate
series of investigations upon palæozoic fishes in general. Earlier
zoölogists, such as the great Agassiz, had devoted most of their
attention to careful and exact description of the different fossil
fishes with which they became acquainted. Huxley at once began to
investigate the relations that existed among the different kinds of
structure exhibited in the different fish. He laid down the lines upon
which future work has been conducted, and, precisely as he did in the
case of molluscs, he started future investigators upon lines of
research the ends of which have not yet been reached. His work upon
_Devonian Fishes_, published in 1861, threw an entirely new light upon
the affinities of these creatures, and still remains a standard work.
He made a similar, although less important, series of investigations
upon some of the great extinct Crustacea; but, perhaps, his most
important palæontological work was done later, after he had been
convinced by Darwin of the fact of evolution. In 1855 he had expressed
the opinion that the study of fossils was hopeless if one sought in it
confirmation of the doctrine of evolution; but five-and-twenty years'
continuous work completely reversed his opinion, and in 1881,
addressing the British Association at York he declared that "if
zoölogists and embryologists had not put forward the theory, it would
have been necessary for palæontologists to invent it." In three
special groups of animals his study of fossils enabled him to assist
in bridging over the gaps between surviving groups of creatures by
study of creatures long extinct. He began to study the structure of
the Labyrinthodonts, a group of extinct monsters which received their
name from the peculiar structure of their teeth. He published
elaborate descriptions of Anthracosaurus from the coal-measures of
Northumberland, of Loxomma from the lower carboniferous of Scotland,
and of several small forms from the coal-measures of Kilkenny, in
Ireland, as well as describing skulls from Africa and a number of
fragmentary bones from different localities. But in all this work it
was the morphology of the creatures that interested him, and the light
which their structure threw upon the structure of each other and of
their nearest allies. He shewed that these monsters stood on the
borderland between fishes, amphibia, and reptiles, and he added much
to our knowledge of the true structure of these great groups. Next, he
turned to the extinct reptiles of the Mesozoic age. It was generally
believed that the Pterodactyls, or flying reptiles, were the nearest
allies of birds, but Huxley insisted that the resemblances between the
wings were simply such superficial resemblances as necessarily exist
in organs adapted to the same purpose. About the same time, Cope in
America, and Phillips and Huxley, in England, from study of the bones
of the Dinosaurs, another great group of extinct reptiles, declared
that these were the nearest in structure to birds. In association with
the upright posture, the ilium or great haunch-bone of birds extends
far forwards in front of the articulation of the thigh-bone, so that
the pelvis in this region has a T-shape, the ilium forming the
cross-bar of the T, and the femur or thigh-bone the downward limb.
Huxley shewed that a large number of the Dinosaurs had this and other
peculiarities of the bird's pelvis, and separated these into a group
which he called the "Ornithoscelida," seeing in them the closest
representatives of the probable reptilian ancestors of birds. While
further work and the discovery of a still greater number of extinct
reptiles has made it less probable that these were the actual
ancestors of birds, Huxley's work in this, as in the many other cases
we have shown, proved not only of great value in itself, but led to a
continually increasing series of investigations by others. It is not
always the pioneer that makes the greatest discoveries in a new
country, but the work of the pioneer makes possible and easier the
more assured discoveries of his followers.
A third great piece of palæontological investigation with which the
name of Huxley will always be associated, is the most familiar of all
the instances taken from fossils in support of the evolution of
animals. This famous case is the pedigree of the horse. In 1870, in an
address delivered to the Geological Society of London, Huxley had
shewn that there was a series of animals leading backwards from the
modern horse to a more generalised creature called Anchitherium, and
found in the rocks of the Miocene period. He suggested that there
were, no doubt, similar fossils leading still further backwards
towards the common mammalian type of animal, with five fingers and
five toes, and went the length of suggesting one or two fossils which
might stand in the direct line of ancestry. But in 1876 he visited
America, and had the opportunity of consulting the marvellous series
of fossils which Professor Marsh had collected from American Tertiary
beds. Professor Marsh allowed him the freest use of his materials and
of his conclusions, and the credit of the final result is to be
shared at least equally between Marsh and Huxley. The final result was
a demonstrative proof of the possible course of evolution of the
horse, given in a lecture delivered by Huxley in New York on Sept. 22,
1876, and illustrated by drawings from specimens in Marsh's
collection. The matter of the lecture has become so important a part
of all descriptive writing on evolution, and the treatment is so
characteristic of Huxley's brilliant exposition, that it is worth
while to make some rather long quotations from it. The lecture was
published in the New York papers, and afterwards with other matter
formed a volume of _American Addresses_, published by Macmillan, in
London.
"In most quadrupeds, as in ourselves, the forearm contains
distinct bones called the radius and the ulna. The corresponding
region in the horse seems at first to possess but one bone.
Careful observation, however, enables us to distinguish in this
bone a part which clearly answers to the upper end of the ulna.
This is closely united with the chief mass of the bone which
represents the radius, and runs out into a slender shaft which
may be traced for some distance downwards on the back of the
radius, and then in most cases thins out and vanishes. It takes
still more trouble to make sure of what is nevertheless the fact,
that a small part of the lower end of the bone of the horse's
forearm, which is only distinct in a very young foal, is really
the lower extremity of the ulna.
"What is commonly called the knee of a horse is its wrist. The
'cannon bone' answers to the middle bone of the five metacarpal
bones which support the palm of the hand in ourselves. The
'pastern,' 'coronary,' and 'coffin' bones of veterinarians answer
to the joints of our middle fingers, while the hoof is simply a
greatly enlarged and thickened nail. But, if what lies below the
horse's 'knee' thus corresponds to the middle finger in
ourselves, what has become of the four other fingers or digits?
We find in the places of the second and fourth digits only two
slender splint-like bones, about two-thirds as long as the cannon
bone, which gradually taper to their lower ends and bear no
finger joints, or, as they are termed, phalanges. Sometimes small
bony or gristly nodules are to be found at the bases of these two
metacarpal splints, and it is probable that these represent
rudiments of the first and fifth digits. Thus the part of the
horse's skeleton which corresponds with that of the human hand
contains one overgrown middle digit, and at least two imperfect
lateral digits; and these answer, respectively, to the third, the
second, and the fourth digits in man.
"Corresponding modifications are found in the hind limb. In
ourselves, and in most quadrupeds, the leg contains two distinct
bones, a large bone, the tibia, and a smaller and more slender
bone, the fibula. But, in the horse, the fibula seems, at first,
to be reduced to its upper end; a short slender bone united with
the tibia and ending in a point below occupying its place.
Examination of the lower end of a young foal's shin-bone,
however, shews a distinct portion of osseous matter, which is the
lower end of the fibula; so that the apparently single lower end
of the shin-bone is really made up of the coalesced ends of the
tibia and fibula, just as the apparently single lower end of the
fore-arm bone is composed of the coalesced radius and ulna.
"The heel of the horse is the part commonly known as the hock;
the hinder cannon bone answers to the middle metatarsal bone of
the human foot, the pastern, coronary, and coffin bones, to the
middle-toe bones; the hind hoof to the nail, as in the fore foot.
And, as in the fore foot, there are merely two splints to
represent the second and fourth toes. Sometimes a rudiment of a
fifth toe appears to be traceable."
Having in the same fashion described the highly complicated and
peculiar structure of the teeth of modern horses, Huxley proceeded:
"To anyone who is acquainted with the morphology of vertebrated
animals, these characteristic structures of the horse show that
it deviates widely from the general structure of mammals; and
that the horse type is, in many respects, an extreme modification
of the general mammalian plan. The least modified mammals, in
fact, have the radius and ulna, the tibia and fibula, distinct
and separate. They have five distinct and complete digits on each
foot, and no one of these digits is very much larger than the
rest. Moreover, in the least modified mammals, the total number
of the teeth is very generally forty-four, while in the horse the
usual number is forty, and, in the absence of the canines, it may
be reduced to thirty-six; the incisor teeth are devoid of the
fold seen in those of the horse; the grinders regularly diminish
in size from the middle of the series to its front end; while
their crowns are short, early attain their full length, and
exhibit simple ridges or tubercles, in place of the complex
foldings of the horse's grinders.
"Hence the general principles of the hypothesis of evolution
lead to the conclusion that the horse must have been derived from
some quadruped which possessed five complete digits on each foot;
which had the bones of the forearm and of the leg complete and
separate; and which possessed forty-four teeth, among which the
crown of the incisors and grinders had a simple structure; while
the latter gradually increased in size from before backwards, at
any rate in the anterior part of the series, and had short
crowns.
"And if the horse had been thus evolved, and the remains of the
different stages of its evolution have been preserved, they ought
to present us with a series of forms in which the number of the
digits becomes reduced; the bones of the forearm and leg
gradually take on the equine condition; and the form and
arrangement of the teeth successively approximate to those which
obtain in existing horses.
"Let us turn to the facts and see how far they fulfill these
requirements of the doctrine of evolution.
"In Europe abundant remains of horses are found in the
Quaternary and later Tertiary strata as far as the Pliocene
formation. But these horses, which are so common in the
cave-deposits and in the gravel of Europe, are in all essential
respects like existing horses, and that is true of all the horses
of the later part of the Pliocene epoch. But, in the deposits
which belong to the earlier Pliocene, and later Miocene epochs,
and which occur in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in
India, we find animals which are extremely like horses--which in
fact are so similar to horses, that you may follow descriptions
given in works upon the anatomy of the horse, upon the skeletons
of these animals--but which differ in some important particulars.
For example, the structure of their fore and hind limbs is
somewhat different. The bones, which, in the horse are
represented by two long splints, imperfect below, are as long as
the middle metacarpal and metatarsal bones; and, attached to the
extremity of each, is a digit with three joints of the same
general character as those of the middle digit, only very much
smaller. These small digits are so disposed that they could have
had but very little functional importance, and they must have
been rather of the nature of the dew-claws, such as are to be
found in many ruminant animals. The _Hipparion_, as the extinct
European three-toed horse is called, in fact presents a foot
similar to that of the American _Protohippus_ except that in
_Hipparion_ the smaller digits are situated further back, and are
of smaller proportional size than in the _Protohippus_.
"The ulna is slightly more distinct than in the horse; and the
whole length of it, as a very slender shaft, intimately united
with the radius, is completely traceable. The fibula appears to
be in the same condition as in the horse. The teeth of the
_Hipparion_ are essentially similar to those of the horse, but
the pattern of the grinders is in some respects a little more
complex, and there is a depression on the face of the skull in
front of the orbit, which is not seen in existing horses.
"In the earlier Miocene and perhaps in the Eocene deposits of
some parts of Europe, another distinct animal has been
discovered, which Cuvier, who first described some fragments of
it, considered to be a _Palæotherium_, but as further discoveries
threw new light on its structure, it was recognised as a distinct
genus, under the name of _Anchitherium_.
"In its general characters the skeleton of _Anchitherium_ is
very similar to that of the horse, in fact Lartet and De
Blainville called it _Palæotherium equinum_ or _Hippoides_; and
De Cristol, in 1847, said that it differed from _Hipparion_ in
little more than the characters of the teeth, and gave it the
name of _Hipparitherium_. Each foot possesses three complete
toes: while the lateral toes are much larger in proportion to the
middle toe than in _Hipparion_, and doubtless rested on the
ground in ordinary locomotion. The ulna is complete and quite
distinct from the radius, although firmly united with the latter.
The fibula seems also to have been complete; its lower end,
though intimately united with that of the tibia, is clearly
united with that of the latter bone. There are forty-four teeth;
the incisors have no strong pit. The canines seem to have been
well developed in both sexes. The first of the seven grinders,
which, as I have said, is frequently absent, and, when it does
exist, is small in the horse, is a good-sized and permanent
tooth, while the grinder which follows it is but little larger
than the hinder ones. The crowns of the grinders are short, and,
although the fundamental pattern of the horse-tooth is
discernible, the front and back ridges are less curved, the
accessory pillars are wanting, and the valleys, much shallower,
are not filled up with cement."
Then, after describing his early efforts to trace the descent of the
horse from European fossils, Huxley goes on to relate the new light
thrown on the matter from the American discoveries of Professor Marsh:
"You are all aware that, when your country was first discovered
by Europeans, there were no traces of the existence of the horse
in any part of the American continent. The accounts of the
conquest of Mexico dwell on the astonishment of the natives of
that country when they first became acquainted with that
astounding phenomenon, a man seated upon a horse. Nevertheless,
the investigations of American geologists have proved that the
remains of horses occur in the most superficial deposits of both
North and South America, just as they do in Europe. Therefore,
for some reason or other,--no feasible suggestion on that
subject, so far as I know, has been made,--the horse must have
died out on this continent at some period preceding the discovery
of America. Of late years there has been discovered in your
Western territories that marvellous accumulation of deposits,
admirably adapted for the preservation of organic remains, to
which I referred the other evening, and which furnishes us with a
consecutive series of records of the fauna of the older half of
the Tertiary epoch, for which we have no parallel in Europe. The
researches of Leidy and others have shewn that forms allied to
the _Hipparion_ and the _Anchitherium_ are to be found among
these remains. Rut it is only recently that the admirably
conceived and most thoroughly and patiently worked-out
investigations of Professor Marsh have given us a just idea of
the vast fossil wealth and of the scientific importance of these
deposits. I have had the advantage of glancing over the
collections in Yale Museum; and I can truly say that, so far as
my knowledge extends, there is no collection from any one region
and series of strata comparable, for extent, or for care with
which the remains have been got together, or for their scientific
importance, to the series of fossils which he has deposited
there. This vast collection has yielded evidence bearing on the
question of the pedigree of the horse of the most striking
character. It tends to show that we must look to America rather
than to Europe for the original seat of the equine series; and
that the archaic forms and successive modifications of the
horse's ancestry are far better preserved here than in Europe.
"Professor Marsh's kindness has enabled me to put before you a
diagram, every figure of which is an actual representation of
some specimen which is to be seen at Yale at this present time.
"The succession of forms which he has brought together carries
us from the top to the bottom of the Tertiaries. Firstly, there
is the true horse. Next we have the American Pliocene form of the
horse (_Pliohippus_): in the conformation of its limbs it
presents some very slight deviations from the ordinary horse, and
the crowns of the grinding teeth are shorter. Then comes the
_Protohippus_, which represents the European _Hipparion_, having
one large digit and two small ones on each foot, and the general
characters of the forearm and leg to which I have referred. But
it is more valuable than the European _Hipparion_ for the reason
that it is devoid of some of the peculiarities of that
form--peculiarities which tend to show that the European
_Hipparion_ is rather a member of a collateral branch than a form
in the direct line of succession. Next, in the backward order in
time, is the _Miohippus_, which corresponds pretty nearly with
the _Anchitherium_ of Europe. It presents three complete
toes--one large median and two smaller lateral ones: and there
is a rudiment of that digit which answers to the little finger of
the human race.
"The European pedigree of the horse stops here; in the America
Tertiaries, on the contrary, the series of ancestral equine forms
is continued into the Eocene formations. An older Miocene form,
called _Mesohippus_, has three toes in front, with a large
splint-like rudiment representing the little finger; and three
toes behind. The radius and ulna, the tibia and fibula, are
distinct, and the short crowned molar teeth are _Anchitherioid_
in pattern.
"But the most important discovery of all is the _Orohippus_
which comes from the Eocene formation, and is the oldest member
of the equine series yet known. Here we find four complete toes
on the front limb, three toes on the hind limb, a well-developed
ulna, a well-developed fibula, and short-crowned grinders of a
simple pattern.
"Thus, thanks to these important researches, it has become
evident that, so far as our present knowledge extends, the
history of the horse type is exactly and precisely that which
could have been predicted from a knowledge of the principles of
evolution; and the knowledge we now possess justifies us
completely in the anticipation that, when the still lower Eocene
deposits, and those which belong to the Cretaceous period have
yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall
find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of the
innermost or first digit in front, with probably a rudiment of
the fifth digit in the hind foot; while, in the older forms, the
series of digits will be more and more complete until we come to
the five-toed animals, in which, if the doctrine of evolution is
well founded, the whole series must have taken its origin."
Just as Huxley was successful, when only the ancestry to Miocene times
was known, in predicting the discovery of older forms in the older
Miocene and upper Eocene, so his prediction of older Eocene forms
carrying the chain back to five-toed creatures proved correct. One of
the new links was indeed discovered before his lecture had passed
through the press, and he was able to add in a footnote some details
of the structure of the four-toed Eohippus from the lower Eocene
beds. Further discoveries have connected these with the five-toed
ancestors of the Tapirs, and there is the strongest reason to suppose
that we now know as nearly as possible the line of ancestry of the
horse back to the primitive forms common to all the higher mammals. It
would, of course, be beyond possibility of proof that the exact
fossils described were the actual ancestors of the horse; but that
they are exceedingly close allies of these, and that among them some
actual ancestors exist cannot reasonably be doubted.
Although he had embarked upon geological work with some distaste,
Huxley became very closely associated with it as years went on, and
indeed, about the seventies, had abandoned his intention to devote
himself specially to physiology, and declared himself to be in the
first place a palæontologist. In 1876 he had accomplished so much that
the Geological Society gave him its chief distinction, awarding him
the Wollaston Medal in recognition of his services to geological
science. He acted as Secretary to the Geological Society from 1859 to
1862, and he was President from 1868 to 1870. In 1862, the President
being incapacitated, Huxley delivered as Deputy-President the
Presidential Address. This address is famous in the history of
geology, because for the first time it stated clearly and in permanent
form a doctrine now taken as a first principle in all geological
text-books. A large part of geology is the attempt to read the past
history of the earth from the evidence given by the successive strata
of rocks that form its crust.
"It is mathematically certain that, in any given vertical linear
section of an undisturbed series of sedimentary deposits, the bed
which lies lowest is the oldest. In many other vertical linear
sections of the same series, of course corresponding beds will
occur in a similar order."
It is of the utmost importance to determine whether or no the same
series occurring vertically in the same order in different parts of
the earth were deposited at the same time. To explain the problem,
Huxley took the following concrete example:
"The Lias of England and the Lias of Germany, the Cretaceous
rocks of Britain and the Cretaceous rocks of Southern India, are
termed by geologists 'Contemporaneous' formations; but whenever
any thoughtful geologist is asked whether he means to say that
they were deposited at the same time, he says, 'No, only within
the same great epoch.' And if, in pursuing the enquiry, he is
asked what may be the approximate value in time of a 'great
epoch'--whether it means a hundred years, or a thousand, or a
million, or ten million years--his reply is, 'I cannot tell.'"
Most of the standard writers on palæontology had assumed that the
presence in two beds at different parts of the world of the same
fossils implied that the beds were contemporaneous, that they had been
formed at the same time. Huxley pointed out that the fact of identical
fossils being present was, on the whole, evidence against the beds
having been formed at the same time. Even some of the older writers
who believed in species having been created at definite places at
definite times had seen that time must have been required for sets of
animals to wander from the places in which they had come into
existence. The newer theory of evolution was equally opposed to the
notion of the appearance of similar animals at the same time on
far-distant parts of the earth. For such reasons he proposed to reject
the use of the word _Contemporaneous_ as applied to rockbeds in
different localities which contained the same fossils, and to replace
it by the word _Homotaxial_, which meant no more than that the beds
occupied corresponding places in the geological history of the earth.
Huxley did not pretend that these arguments were entirely original:
they represented the drift of the best geological opinion, and he
seized hold of them and set them down as permanent geological truths.
In 1869, in a Presidential Address to the Geological Society, Huxley
took up one of the burning questions of the day. In the early part of
the century, the discoveries of geologists had been the occasion of
great distress to those good people who clung to a literal
interpretation of everything in the Bible. Long before the doctrine of
evolution and the descent of man from lower animals had taken practical
shape, there had been a battle royal between geologists who declared
that the earth was many million years old, and had been inhabited at
least by animals and plants for enormous periods, and those who clung to
the traditional chronology which placed the date of creation only a few
thousand years from now. The continued progress of geology, and the
sturdy championship of it by men like Sedgwick, Chalmers, and Buckland,
who were at the same time reputable theologians and distinguished men of
science, had decided the battle in favour of the conclusions of science,
and it was accepted generally that the earth was almost indefinitely
old. At the same time, another and more strictly scientific dispute had
been in progress. The older school of geologists, looking on the face of
the world, and seeing it scarred by mighty fissures, displaying huge
distortions of the beds in the crust, had argued that geological change
had taken place by a series of mighty catastrophes. The tremendous
results which they saw seemed to them only possible on the theory that
unusual and gigantic displays of force had caused them. On the other
hand, Hutton and Lyell attempted to find adequate explanation of the
greatest changes in the slow forces which may be seen in operation at
the present time. Slow movements of upheaval and depression, amounting
at most to an inch or two in a century, may be shown to be actually in
existence now, and such slow changes acting for very many centuries
would account for the raising of continents above the sea, so that old
sea-bottoms became the surface of the land, and for the depression of
land areas so that new sedimentary rocks might be deposited upon them.
They shewed how air and water slowly crumbled away the hardest rocks,
and how rivers deepened their beds steadily but excessively slowly; and
they held that while great catastrophic changes might occasionally have
occurred, there was ample evidence of the present operation of forces
which, granted sufficient time for their operation, would have made the
crust of the earth such as it is. This doctrine of _Uniformitarianism_,
of the action of similar forces in the past and present history of the
earth, had almost completely triumphed over the older catastrophic
views. As Huxley put it, the school of catastrophe put no limit to the
violence of forces which had operated; the uniformitarians put no limit
to the length of time during which forces had operated.
"Catastrophism has insisted upon the existence of a practically
unlimited bank of force, on which the theorist might draw; and it
has cherished the idea of development of the earth from a state
in which its form, and the forces which it exerted, were very
different from those which we now know.
"Uniformitarianism, on the other hand, has with equal justice
insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready to
discount any quantity of hypothetical paper. It has kept before
our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being granted,
and has compelled us to exhaust known causes before flying to the
unknown."
But there was a third influence at work in geology, an influence which
may best be described in Huxley's own words:
"I shall not make what I have to say on this head clear unless I
diverge, or seem to diverge, for a while, from the direct path of
my discourse so far as to explain what I take to be the scope of
geology itself. I conceive geology to be the history of the
earth, in precisely the same sense as biology is the history of
living beings; and I trust you will not think that I am
overpowered by the influence of a dominant pursuit if I say that
I trace a close analogy between these two histories.
"If I study a living being, under what heads does the knowledge
I obtain fall? I can learn its structure, or what we call its
Anatomy; and its development, or the series of changes it passes
through to acquire its complete structure. Then I find that the
living being has certain powers resulting from its own
activities, and the interaction of these with the activities of
other things--the knowledge of which is Physiology. Beyond this,
the living being has a position in space and time, which is its
Distribution. All these form the body of ascertainable facts
which constitute the _status quo_ of the living creature. But
these facts have their causes; and the ascertainment of these
causes is the doctrine of Ætiology.
"If we consider what is knowable about the earth, we shall find
that such earth-knowledge--if I may so translate the word
geology--falls into the same categories.
"What is termed stratigraphical geology is neither more nor less
than the anatomy of the earth; and the history of the succession
of the formations is a history of the succession of such
anatomies, or corresponds with development, as distinct from
generation.
"The internal heat of the earth, the elevation and depression of
its crust, its belching forth of vapours, ashes, and lava, are
its activities, in as strict a sense as are warmth and the
movements and products of respiration the activities of an
animal. The phenomena of the seasons, of the trade-winds, of the
Gulf Stream, are as much the results of the reaction between
these inner activities and outward forces, as are the budding of
the leaves in spring, and their falling in autumn the effects of
the interaction between the organisation of a plant and the solar
light and heat. And, as the study of the activities of the living
being is called its physiology, so are these phenomena the
subject matter of an analogous telluric physiology, to which we
sometimes give the name of meteorology; sometimes of physical
geography, sometimes that of geology. Again, the earth has a
place in space and time, and relations to other bodies in both
these respects, which constitute its distribution. This subject
is usually left to the astronomer; but a knowledge of its broad
outlines seems to me to be an essential constituent of the stock
of geological ideas.
"All that can be ascertained concerning the structure,
succession of conditions, actions, and position in space of the
earth, is the matter of its natural history. But, as in Biology,
there remains the matter of reasoning from these facts to their
causes, which is just as much science as the other, and indeed
more; and this constitutes geological ætiology.
"Having regard to this general scheme of geological knowledge
and thought, it is obvious that geological speculation may be, so
to speak, anatomical and developmental speculation, so far as it
relates to points of stratigraphical arrangement which are out of
reach of direct observation; or, it may be physiological
speculation so far as it relates to undetermined problems
relative to the activities of the earth; or, it may be
distributional speculation, if it deals with modifications of the
earth's place in space; or, finally, it will be ætiological
speculation if it attempts to deduce the history of the world, as
a whole, from the known properties of the matter of the earth, in
the conditions in which the earth has been placed."
Huxley then proceeded to shew that uniformitarianism and catastrophism
had neglected this last and most important branch of geology, the
attempt to trace the interaction of causes which had brought the world
into its present condition. He gave a striking display of the wide
knowledge of his reading by going back to the foundation of this branch
of modern science, and giving a masterly account of the then
little-known treatise of Immanuel Kant, who in 1775 had written _An
Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the
Universe upon Newtonian Principles_. Next he declared that evolution
embraced all that was sound in both catastrophism and uniformitarianism
while rejecting the arbitrary limits and assumptions of both.
Finally he came to the great question to which these observations upon
the existing schools of geology had led. The most distinguished
physicist of the age, then Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, and
Huxley's immediate successor in the Presidential Chair of the Royal
Society, had stated that the English school of geology had assumed an
impossible age for the earth. By physical reasonings, Thomson stated
that he was able to prove "That the existing state of things on the
earth--all geological history showing continuity of life--must be
limited within some such period of time as one hundred million years."
This pronouncement had been received with acclamation by those who
feared the geological and biological sciences, as a sign of internal
dissensions within the house of science. Huxley, then, as all through
the latter part of his life, at once constituted himself the champion
of science, and, taking Thomson's arguments one by one, shewed by a
series of masterly deductions from known facts that there was a great
deal to be said for the other side, and that physicists were as little
certain as geologists could be of the exact duration of time that had
elapsed since the dawn of life. His plea for more time since the
cooling of the globe than physicists were willing to allow remains one
of the classics of geological literature. But he carried the question
much farther. The inference which was widely drawn by the enemies of
evolution from the arguments of Sir William Thomson was that if
geologists had overestimated the age of the cooled earth there was not
time for the evolution of animals and plants to have taken place.
Huxley pointed out a fact which should be quite obvious, but which
even yet is frequently neglected. The evidence for the gradual
appearance of life in the past history of the earth depends simply on
the fact that the successive forms of life appear in successive
strata, and the length of time taken for these changes simply depends
upon the length of time which was taken up by the formation of the
strata. Our only reason for supposing the evolution of life, made
plain by fossil records, to have taken place very slowly is that
geologists have stated that the deposition of the strata took place
very slowly. Whether these strata were deposited slowly or less
slowly, we know that the forms of life changed at the same rate.
"Biology takes her time from geology. The only reason we have for
believing in the slow rate of change in living forms is the fact
that they persist through a series of deposits which, geology
informs us, have taken a long while to make. If the geological
clock is wrong, all the naturalist will have to do is to modify
his notion of the rapidity of change accordingly; and I venture
to point out that, when we are told that the limitation of the
period during which living beings have inhabited this planet to
one, two, or three hundred million years requires a complete
revolution in geological speculation, the _onus probandi_ rests
on the maker of the assertion, who brings forward not a shadow of
evidence in its support."
Perhaps, although this is now an old controversy, it is worth while
to recall that the keenness of Huxley's language was not directed
against Sir William Thomson, between whom and Huxley there was no more
than the desire to argue out an interesting scientific question upon
which their conclusions differed, but between Huxley and those
outsiders who were always ready to turn any dubious question in
science into an argument discrediting the general conclusions of
science.
The last time that Huxley occupied the Presidential Chair of the
Geological Society was in 1870, and he occupied his Presidential
address by a review of the "old judgments" which he had given in the
course of his first address in 1862. The address was entitled
"Palæontology and Evolution," and the most important part of it was a
complete withdrawal of the fears he had expressed that geology would
not supply definite evidence of the transformation of species.
Important discoveries had come thick and fast; and, at least in the
case of the higher vertebrates, he declared that, however one might
"sift and criticise them," they left a clear balance in favour of the
doctrine of the evolution of living forms one from another. But, with
his usual critical spirit, examining arguments that bore against a
conclusion for which he hoped almost more stringently than arguments
apparently favourable to what he expected to be true, Huxley made an
important distinction, the value of which becomes more and more
apparent as time goes on. In the first flush of enthusiasm for
Darwinism, zoölogists and palæontologists allowed their zeal to outrun
discretion in the formation of family trees. They examined large
series of living or extinct creatures, and so soon as they found
gradations of structure present, they arranged their specimens in a
linear series, from the simplest to the most complex, and declared
that the arrangement was a representation of the family tree. The fact
that the line of descent apparently could have followed along the
direction they suggested they were inclined to take as evidence that
it had so followed. Huxley made the most careful distinction between
what he called intermediate types and types with a right to be placed
in linear order,
Every fossil which takes an intermediate place between forms of
life already known may be said, so far as it is intermediate, to
be evidence in favour of evolution, inasmuch as it shews a
possible road by which evolution may have taken place. But the
mere discovery of such a form does not, in itself, prove that
evolution took place by and through it, nor does it constitute
more than a presumptive evidence in favour of evolution in
general. The fact that _Anoplotheridæ_ are intermediate between
pigs and ruminants does not tell us whether the ruminants have
come from the pigs or the pigs from the ruminants, or both from
_Anoplotheridæ_, or whether pigs, ruminants, and _Anoplotheridæ_;
alike may not have diverged from some common stock.
A familiar instance will make the point at issue plain. Everyone knows
that in many respects, in the structure of the skeleton, and the curve
of the backbone, and in the development of the brain, the man-like
monkeys, the gorilla and its allies, are intermediate between man and
the lower monkeys. In the early days of evolution it was assumed
frequently that the gorilla, etc., were therefore to be regarded as
ancestors of man, and they appear as such in more than one well-known
treatise on evolutionary biology. We now know that it is exceedingly
probable that the gorilla and its allies, although truly intermediate
types, and truly shewing a possible path of evolution from the brute
to man, are not the actual ancestors of man, but cousins, descendants
like man from some more or less remote common ancestor. And the
tendency of recent advances in knowledge is more and more to throw
stress on the value of Huxley's distinction, and to minimise confusion
between "intermediate" and truly ancestral types.
CHAPTER VI
HUXLEY AND DARWIN
Early Ideas on Evolution--Erasmus Darwin--Lamarck--Herbert
Spencer--Difference between Evolution and Natural
Selection--Huxley's Preparation for Evolution--The Novelty of
Natural Selection--The Advantage of Natural Selection as a
Working Hypothesis--Huxley's Unchanged Position with regard to
Evolution and Natural Selection from 1860 to 1894.
From our attempt to place together as much as possible of Huxley's
geological work in the last chapter, it followed that we anticipated
much that falls properly within this chapter. The year 1859, the date
of publication of _The Origin of Species_, is a momentous date in the
history of this century, as it was the year in which there was given
to the world a theory that not only revolutionised scientific opinion,
but altered the trend of almost every branch of thought. To understand
this great change, and the part played in it by Huxley, it is
necessary to be quite clear as to what Darwin did. In the first place,
he did not invent evolution. The idea that all the varied structures
in the world, the divergent forms of rocks and minerals and crystals,
the innumerable trees and herbs that cover the face of the earth like
a mantle, and all the animal host of creatures great and small that
dwell on the land or dart through the air or people the waters,--that
all these had arisen by natural laws from a primitive unformed
material was known to the Greeks, was developed by the Romans, and
even received the approval of early Christian Fathers, who wrote long
before the idea had been invented that the naive legends of the Old
Testament were an authoritative and literal account of the origin of
the world. After a long interval, in which scientific thought was
stifled by theological dogmatism, the theory of evolution,
particularly in its application to animals, began to reappear, long
before Darwin published _The Origin of Species_. Buffon, the great
French naturalist, and Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, had
expressed in the clearest way the possibility that species had not
been created independently, but had arisen from other species. Lamarck
had worked out a theory of descent in the fullest detail, and regarded
it as the foundation of the whole science of biology. He taught that
the beginning of life consisted only of the simplest and lowest plants
and animals; that the more complex animals and plants arose from
these, and that even man himself had come from ape-like mammals. He
held that the course of development of the earth and of all the
creatures upon it was a slow and continuous change, uninterrupted by
violent revolutions. He summed up the causes of organic evolution in
the following propositions[D]:
"1. Life tends by its inherent forces to increase the volume of
each living body and of all its parts up to a limit determined by
its own needs.
"2. New wants in animals give rise to new movements which
produce organs.
"3. The development of these organs is in proportion to their
employment.
"4. New developments are transmitted to offspring."
He supported especially the last two propositions by a series of
examples as to the effects of use and disuse; and the most famous of
these, the theory that giraffes had produced their long necks by
continually stretching up towards the trees on which they fed, is well
known to everyone. However, the ingenious speculations of Lamarck were
unsupported by a sufficient range of actual knowledge of anatomy, and
lacked experimental proof. He entirely failed to convince his
contemporaries; and Darwin himself, in a letter to Lyell, declared
that he had gained nothing from two readings of Lamarck's book. There
can be little doubt but that several Continental writers, in
particular Haeckel, have exaggerated Lamarck's services to the
development of the idea of evolution. On the other hand, Lyell,
although he strongly opposed the ideas of Lamarck and some curious
notions of progressional creation due to the great Agassiz, had
prepared the way for Darwin by his advocacy of natural causes and slow
changes in opposition to the catastrophic and miraculous views in
vogue. Above all, Herbert Spencer had argued most strenuously in
favour of evolution. Thus, in an important passage quoted by Mr. Clodd
from the _Leader_ of March 20, 1852, Spencer had written as follows:
"Those who cavalierly reject the theory of evolution, as not
adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their
own theory is not supported by facts at all. Like the majority of
men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous
proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs
none. Here we find, scattered over the globe, vegetable and
animal organisms numbering, of the one kind (according to
Humboldt) some 320,000 species, and of the other, some 2,000,000
species (see Carpenter); and if to these we add the numbers of
animal and vegetable species that have become extinct, we may
safely estimate the number of species that have existed, and are
existing, on the earth, at no less than ten millions. Well, which
is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species?
Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special
creations; or is it most likely that by continual modifications,
due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have
been produced, as varieties are being produced still?... Even
could the supporters of the development hypothesis merely shew
that the origination of species by the process of modification is
conceivable, they would be in a better position than their
opponents. But they can do much more than this. They can shew
that the process of modification has effected, and is effecting,
decided changes in all organisms subject to modifying
influences.... They can shew that in successive generations these
changes continue, until ultimately the new conditions become the
natural ones. They can shew that in cultivated plants,
domesticated animals, and in the several races of men, such
alterations have taken place. They can show that the degrees of
difference so produced are often, as in dogs, greater than those
on which distinctions of species have been founded. They can
shew, too, that the changes daily taking place in ourselves--the
facility that attends long practice, and the loss of aptitude
that begins when practice ceases,--the strengthening of the
passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of those
habitually curbed,--the development of every faculty, bodily,
moral, intellectual, according to the use made of it--are all
explicable on this principle. And thus they can shew that
throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying
influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific
differences; an influence which, though slow in its action, does,
in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked
changes--an influence which, to all appearance, would produce in
the millions of years, and under the great varieties of condition
which geological records imply, any amount of change."
These and many other instances which might be brought together from
the published writings of the half-century before the publication of
the _Origin_, show conclusively that the idea of evolution was far
from new, and that all through the first part of this century
dissatisfaction with the doctrine of the fixity of species and of
their miraculous creation was growing. The great contribution of
Darwin was this: First, by his theory of natural selection, he brought
together the known facts of variation, of struggle for existence, and
of adaptation to varying conditions, in such a way that they provided
men with a rational and known cause, a cause the operation of which
could be seen, for the origin of species by means of preservation of
favoured races. Next, as to the origin of species, he brought together
not only proofs of the actual operation of natural selection, but a
body of evidence in favour of the fact of evolution that was, beyond
all comparison, more striking than had been adduced by any earlier
philosophical or biological writer. He convinced naturalists that
evolution was by far the most probable way in which the living world
had come to be what it is, and he made them turn to examination of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms with a lively hope that the past history
of the living world was not an insoluble problem. Darwin's doctrine
brought a new life into biological study, and the result of the
incomparably greater bulk of investigation that followed the year 1859
was a continual increase of evidence in favour of the probability of
evolution, until now the whole scientific world, and the majority of
those who are unscientific, are content to accept evolution as the
only reasonable explanation of the living world. It is well to
remember that while Darwin, by bringing forward the theory of struggle
for existence and resulting survival of the fittest, was the actual
cause of the present assured position of evolution as a first
principle of science, it by no means follows that the survival of the
fittest has become similarly a first principle of science. At cross
roads a traveller may choose the right path from a quite
unsatisfactory reason. Darwin himself, in the act of bringing forward
his own theory of natural selection, admitted the possibility of the
co-operation of many other agencies in evolution, and at various times
during the course of his life he was inclined to attach, now more now
less, importance to these additional agencies. Huxley, as we shall
soon come to see, never wavered in his adhesion to the facts of
evolution after 1859; but, from first to last, regarded natural
selection as only the most probable cause of the occurrence of
evolution. Other naturalists, of whom the best-known are Weismann in
Germany, Ray Lankester in England, and W.K. Brooks in America, have
come to attach a continually increasing importance to the purely
Darwinian factor of natural selection; while others again, such as
Herbert Spencer in England, and the late Professor Cope and a large
American school, have advocated more and more strongly the importance
of what may be called the Lamarckian factors of evolution,--the
inherited effects of increased or diminished use of organs, the direct
influence of the environment, and so forth. From the fact that Darwin
has persuaded the world of the truth of evolution, evolution is often
called Darwinism; and in this historically just though scientifically
inaccurate sense of the term, Huxley was a strict Darwinian, a
Darwinian of the Darwinians. From the facts that, although natural
selection had been formulated by several writers before Darwin, and
had been simultaneously elaborated by Wallace and Darwin, the _Origin
of Species_ was the foundation of the modern acceptation of evolution,
and natural selection was the key-note of the origin of species,
natural selection may be called Darwinism with both historical and
scientific accuracy; and in this sense of the term Huxley was a
Darwinian; a convinced but free-thinking and broad-minded Darwinian,
who was far from persuaded that his tenet had a monopoly of truth, and
who delighted in shewing the distinctions between what seemed to him
probable and what was proved, and in absorbing from other doctrines
whatever he thought worthy to be absorbed. The present writer has
thought it so important to distinguish between these two sides of the
word _Darwinism_, that for the sake of clearness he has stated what he
believes to be the truth of Huxley's relation to Darwin before
beginning detailed exposition of it.
In consideration of Huxley's position before 1859, the most
interesting feature of his zoölogical work is the gradual preparation
that it was making in his mind for the doctrine of the _Origin_. He
was like an engineer boring a tunnel through a mountain, but ignorant
of how near he was to the pleasant valley on the other side; and,
above all, ignorant how rapidly he was being met by a much more mighty
excavation from the other side. To use what is perhaps a more exact
simile: he was like a child with half the pieces of a puzzle-map,
slowly linking them together as far as they would fit, and quite
ignorant that presently the remaining half would suddenly be given
him, and with almost no trouble would at once fit into the gaps he had
necessarily left, and transform a meaningless pattern into a perfect
and intelligible whole. Let us consider some of these map pieces. The
ultimate picture was the conception of the whole world of life, past
and present, as a single family tree growing up from the simplest
possible roots, and gradually spreading out first into the two main
branches of animals and plants, and then into the endless series of
complicated ramifications that make up living and extinct animals and
plants. Huxley was piecing together the scattered fragments, and
gradually learning to see here and there whole branches, as yet
separate at their lower ends, but in themselves shapely, and showing a
general resemblance to one another in the gradual progression from
simple to complex. The greatest of these branches that he had pieced
together was the group of Medusæ and their allies, now known as
Coelenterates. He had formed similar branches for the Molluscs and
minor branches for the Salps and Ascidians, and, in his general
lectures on the whole animal kingdom, he had shadowed out the broad
arrangement of the main divisions, or, as he called them, _types_. He
had seen in each particular branch the clearest evidence of the laws
of growth which had directed its development, and had realised that
these laws of growth, consisting of gradual modifications of common
typical structures, were identical in the different branches. He had
taken clear hold of Von Baer's conception that the younger stages of
different types were more alike than the adult stages, and here and
there he had made comparisons between the younger stages or simplest
forms of his different branches, and had shown that, without
completely realising it, he was ready for the idea that just as the
separate pieces could be arranged to form orderly branches, so the
separate branches might come to be arranged as a single tree. And
finally, in his lectures on "Protoplasm and Cells," and on the
"Common Structure of the Animal and Plant Kingdoms," he had reached
the conclusion that the two main divisions of the living world were
formed of the same stuff, displayed in identical fashion the
elementary functions of life, and were creatures of the same order.
But, notwithstanding this close approach to modern conceptions, he was
not an evolutionist. When, in public, he expressed deliberate
convictions, these convictions were against the general idea of
evolution, until very shortly before 1859. In this opposition he was
supported partly by the critical scepticism of his mind, which in all
things made him singularly unwilling to accept any theories of any
kind, but chiefly from the fact that the books of the two chief
supporters of evolutionary conceptions impressed him very
unfavourably. Huxley writes:
"I had studied Lamarck attentively, and I had read the _Vestiges_
with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground
for changing my negative and critical attitude. As for the
_Vestiges_, I confess that the book simply irritated me by the
prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind
manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all,
it set me against evolution; and the only review I ever have
qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery is
one I wrote on the _Vestiges_ while under that influence. With
respect to the _Philosophie Zoologique_, it is no reproach to
Lamarck to say that the discussion of the species question in
that work, whatever might be said for it in 1809, was miserably
below the level of the knowledge of half a century later. In that
interval of time, the elucidation of the structure of the lower
animals and plants had given rise to wholly new conceptions of
their relations; histology and embryology, in the modern sense,
had been created; physiology had been reconstituted; the facts of
distribution, geological and geographical, had been prodigiously
multiplied and reduced to order. To any biologist whose studies
had carried him beyond mere species-mongering, in 1850 one-half
of Lamarck's arguments were obsolete, and the other half
erroneous or defective, in virtue of omitting to deal with the
various classes of evidence which had been brought to light since
his time. Moreover his one suggestion as to the cause of the
gradual modification of species--effort excited by change of
conditions--was, on the face of it, inapplicable to the whole
vegetable world. I do not think that any impartial judge who
reads the _Philosophie Zoologique_ now, and who afterwards takes
up Lyell's trenchant and effective criticism (published as far
back as 1830) will be disposed to allot to Lamarck a much higher
place in the establishment of biological evolution than that
which Bacon assigns to himself in relation to physical science
generally--_buccinator tantum_".
On the other hand, Huxley's friendship with Darwin and with Lyell
began to make him less certain about the fixity of species. He tells
us that during his first interview with Darwin, which occurred soon
after his return from the _Rattlesnake_, he
"expressed his belief in the sharpness of the lines of
demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of
transitional forms, with all the confidence of youth and
imperfect knowledge. I was not aware at that time that he had
been many years brooding over the species question; and the
humorous smile which accompanied his gentle answer, that such was
not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled me."
An elaborate study of Lyell's works helped largely in destroying this
youthful confidence, and a letter written by Lyell and quoted by
Huxley in the chapter he communicated to Darwin's _Life and Letters_,
states that in April, 1856, "when Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were
at Darwin's last week they (all four of them) ran a tilt against
species; further I believe, than they are prepared to go." Another
quotation from Huxley's essay on _The Reception of the Origin of
Species_ will make it plain beyond all doubt that he was not a
Darwinian before Darwin.
[Illustration: SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER]
"Thus, looking hack into the past, it seems to me that my own
position of critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and must
have been taken up, on the same grounds, by many other persons.
If Agassiz had told me that the forms of life which had
successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of
successive thoughts of the Deity; and that He had wiped out one
set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe
as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself
not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the
facts of palæontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was
founded, but I had to confess my want of means of testing the
correctness of his explanation of them. And besides that, I could
by no means see what the explanation explained. Neither did it
help me to be told by an eminent anatomist that species had
succeeded one another in time, in virtue of a 'continuously
operative creational law'. That seemed to me to be no more than
saying that species had succeeded one another in the form of a
vote-catching resolution, with 'law' to please the man of science
and 'creational' to draw the orthodox. So I took refuge in that
_thätige Skepsis_ which Goethe has so well defined; and,
reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I
usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I
had to do with the transmutationists, and stood up for the
possibility of transmutation among the orthodox--thereby, no
doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved,
reputation for needless combativeness."
What transformed Huxley's views and the views of his contemporaries
who accepted Darwinism was not so much the evidence in favour of
evolution contained in the _Origin_, as the illuminating doctrine of
natural selection which for the first time supplied naturalists with a
reasonable explanation of how evolution might have come about, both in
the animal and vegetable kingdoms. As soon as this reason was
provided them, they turned to the store of facts within their own
knowledge, and rapidly arranged the evidence which had been lurking
only partly visible in favour of the fact of evolution. It cannot be
disputed that here and there earlier writers than Darwin and Wallace
had suggested the possibility of natural selection acting upon
existing variations so as to cause survival of the fittest.
MacGillivray, the Scots naturalist, and the father of Huxley's
companion on t
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