Walter Frank Raphael Weldon

“ Huxley's influence upon the scheme of education finally adopted was very great, although he left the board in 1872.
In speaking of the later stages of education, he dwelt upon the great value of literary training as a means of intellectual culture, but he never tired of contending that a perfect culture, which should 'supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations,' could not be acquired without a training in the methods of physical science. ”

“ Darwin rendered a belief in the occurrence of transmutation far easier than it had been by his collection of facts illustrating the extent of variation; while the theory of natural selection provided a working hypothesis, adequate to explain the alleged phenomena, and capable of being experimentally tested. The attempt to secure a fair trial for the new hypothesis, which Huxley felt it his duty to make, involved a great expenditure of time and strength. ”

“ At the same time he was careful to emphasise his horror of the prevalent idea that a mere acquaintance with the 'useful' results of scientific work has any educational value. He well knew that educational discipline can only be obtained by the pursuit of knowledge without regard to its practical applications ”

“ The conception of a morphological type, which was then supported in England by the great influence of (Sir) Richard Owen [q. v.] , may be understood from his definition of homology, which he interprets 'as signifying that essential character of a part which belongs to it in its relation to a predetermined pattern, answering to the "idea" of the archetypal world in the Platonic cosmogony, which archetype or primal pattern is the basis supporting all the modifications of such part ... in all animals possessing it' (Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, 1849) . ”

“ One great result of the work on birds, together with the study of fossil reptiles, was a recognition of the fundamental similarities between the two, which Huxley expressed by uniting birds and reptiles in one great group, the Sauropsida. Other results obtained were shortly summarised in an essay 'On the Classification of Birds' (Zool. Soc. Proc. 1867) , containing an elaborate account of the modifications exhibited by the bones of the palate. This essay exhibits in an entirely new light the problems which have to be solved before we can establish a natural classification of birds. ”

“ In spite of the immense amount of work he contrived to perform, Huxley never enjoyed robust health after the accidental poisoning already mentioned. Fresh air and some daily exercise were necessary in order to ward off digestive difficulties, accompanied by lassitude and depression of a severe kind ; but fresh air and exercise are the most difficult of all things for a busy man in London to obtain. ”

“ We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. ”

“ For him, as for Von Baer and Johannes Müller, the only useful 'morphological type' was a general statement of those structural characters common to all members of a group of animals in the embryonic or the adult state. Such conceptions could be tested and corrected by observation ; and, until the 'Origin of Species' appeared, Huxley regarded any hypothesis concerning the nature of the bond between animals which exhibit the same structural plan as altogether premature. ”

“ Owen declared that the human brain was distinguished from that of all other animals by the backward projection of the cerebral hemispheres, so as to cover the cerebellum, and by the backward prolongation of the cavity of each cerebral hemisphere into a 'posterior horn,' with an associated 'hippocampus minor.' It is difficult to understand how an anatomist of Owen's experience can have made these statements ”

“ The lectures in 1867 dealt with birds, and Professor Newton writes of them : 'It is much to be regretted that his many engagements hindered him from publishing in its entirety his elucidation of the anatomy of the class, and the results which he drew from his investigations of it ; for never, assuredly, had the subject been attacked with greater skill and power, or, since the days of Buffon, had ornithology been set forth with greater eloquence' (Newton, A Dictionary of Birds, p. 38) . ”

“ Many were the discussions of this doctrine in which he took part, and especially important and interesting was his share in the debate on the question during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford in 1860.
The consequence of Darwin's theory, which many persons found the greatest difficulty in accepting, was a belief in the gradual evolution of man from some lower form; and evidence which seemed to establish a broad gap between the structure of man and that of other animals was welcomed. ”

“ To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited ; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events. Each of these beliefs can be verified experimentally as often as we like to try. ”

“ An important characteristic of Huxley's teaching, both in his lectures to students and in his technical memoirs, may here be noticed. Darwin had suggested an interpretation of the facts of embryology which led to the hope that a fuller knowledge of development might reveal the ancestral history of all the great groups of animals, at least in its main outlines. ”

“ Much of his work on systematic ethnology remains unpublished ; but in 1865 he published an essay 'On the Methods and Results of Ethnology,' containing a scheme of classification of the races of mankind, based on the characters of the hair, the colour of the skin, and the cranial index. He evidently contemplated a more complete study of physical anthropology ; for among the materials left in his laboratory are some hundreds of photographs of various races of men, which he had collected before 1870. ”

“ Huxley applied to the skull the same method of analysis as that he had so successfully applied to other structures. In his essay 'On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull,' read as the Croonian lecture before the Royal Society in 1858, he endeavours to formulate a morphological type of cranial structure in an inductive statement of those characters which are common to the skulls of a number of representative vertebrates in the adult and embryonic conditions. ”

“ In his lectures he described a small series of animals, carefully chosen to illustrate important types of structure ; and his aim was that every student should be enabled to test general statements concerning a group of animals by reference to one member of the group which he had been made to know thoroughly. Huxley realised from the first that the thorough knowledge of representative animals, which is the only proper foundation for a knowledge of morphology, ought to be acquired by direct observation in the laboratory ”

“ In 1862 he delivered an address to the Geological Society, in which he attacked a doctrine then widely held. The order in which the various forms of life appear, as we examine the fossiliferous rocks from the oldest to the most recent, is practically the same in all parts of the world. ”

“ In 1861 Huxley published two essays, one 'On the Brain of Ateles Paniscus,' and one 'On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals,' in which it was clearly shown that Owen's statements were inaccurate and inconsistent with well-known facts. Between 1859 and 1862 he gave a series of lectures 'On the Comparative Anatomy of Man and the Higher Apes,' published in book form under the title 'Zoological Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature' (1863, Collected Essays, vol. vii.) There is a sense in which the publication of this book marks the beginning of a new period of his work ”

“ These expositions of the morphology of three widely different groups of animals established Huxley's reputation as a scientific anatomist of the first rank; and the success which attended his use of simple inductive generalisation as a statement of morphological type had great effect upon the methods of English biologists. While winning reputation and the warm friendship of many among the ablest men in London, he was not earning money ”

“ The most important problem, suggested by continual work upon vertebrates, whether recent or fossil, is that presented by the composition of the skull. The doctrine prevalent in England was that which Owen had learned from Goethe and Oken. According to Owen, the archetype skeleton of a vertebrate 'represents the idea of a series of essentially similar segments succeeding each other in the axis of the body ”

“ This book and a series of lectures 'On the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature,' addressed to working men and printed in 1863, were widely read and discussed, and from henceforth Huxley devoted a continually increasing amount of energy to popular teaching and to the controversy arising in connection with it. ”

“ Any one who will try to demonstrate the existence of this layer by the methods at Huxley's command will appreciate the power of observation shown by the discovery.
He graduated M.B. in London University in 1845, winning a gold medal for anatomy and physiology. In 1846, being qualified to practise his profession, he applied for an appointment in the royal navy. An application to the director-general, suggested by a fellow-student, was successful, and he was sent to Haslar hospital on the books of Nelson's ship Victory. ”

“ With their help, and that of Sir John Richardson, he obtained from the admiralty an appointment as assistant surgeon to a ship then stationed at Woolwich, with leave of absence which enabled him to arrange the materials amassed during his voyage, and to prepare his notes for publication. Accordingly in 1851 he published two memoirs on the Ascidians, in which several aberrant genera (especially appendicularia and doliolum) are shown to be modifications of the same morphological type as that found in other ascidians ”