Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1Huxley, Thomas Henry
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Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
He had continued the same work by tracing homologies of development in
other classes of animals, such as the Cephalous Mollusca, the
Articulata, and the Brachiopods. On these subjects, also, he had a good
deal of correspondence with other investigators of the same cast of
mind, and even when he did not carry conviction, the impression made by
his arguments may be judged from the words of Dr. Allman, no mean
authority, in a letter of May 2, 1852:--]
I have thought over your arguments again and again, and while I am the
more convinced of their ingenuity, originality, and STRENGTH, I yet feel
ashamed to confess that I too must exclaim "tenax propositi." When was
it otherwise in controversy?
[Other speculations arising out of these researches had been given to
the public in the form of lectures, notably that on Animal Individuality
at the Royal Institution in 1852.
But after 1854, Paleontology and administrative work began to claim much
of the time he would willingly have bestowed upon distinctly zoological
research. His lectures on Natural History of course demanded a good deal
of first-hand investigation, and not only occasional notes in his
fragmentary journals, but a vast mass of drawings now preserved at South
Kensington attest the amount of work he still managed to give to these
subjects. But with the exception of the Hunterian Lectures of 1868, he
only published one paper on Invertebrates as late as 1860; and only half
a dozen, not counting the belated "Oceanic Hydrozoa," bear 1856 and
1859. The essay on the Crayfish did not appear until after he had left
Jermyn Street and Paleontology for South Kensington.
The "Method of Paleontology," published in 1856, was the first of a long
series of papers dealing with fossil creatures, the description of which
fell to him as Naturalist to the Geological Survey. By 1860 he had
published twelve such papers, and by 1871 twenty-six more, or
thirty-eight in sixteen years.
It was a curious irony of fate that led him into this position. He
writes in his Autobiography that, when Sir Henry de la Beche, the
Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered him the post Forbes
vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Natural History,]
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 paleontological.
[Yet the diversion was not without great use. A wide knowledge of
paleontology offered a key to many problems that were hotly debated in
the years of battle following the publication of the "Origin of Species"
in 1859, as well as providing fresh subject-matter for the lectures in
which he continued to give the lay world the results of his thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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