Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
[The year 1857 was the last in which Huxley apparently had time to go so
far in journal-writing as to draw up a balance-sheet at the year's end
of work done and work undone. Though he finds] "as usual a lamentable
difference between agenda and acta; many things proposed to be done not
done, and many things not thought of finished," [still there is enough
noted to satisfy most energetic people. Mention has already been made of
his lectures--sixty-six at Jermyn Street, twelve Fullerian, and as many
more to prepare for the next year's course; seven to working men, and
one at the Royal Institution, together with the rearrangement of
specimens at the Jermyn Street Museum, and the preparation of the
Explanatory Catalogue, which this year was published to the extent of
the Introduction and the Tertiary collections. To these may be added
examinations at the London University, where he had succeeded Dr.
Carpenter as examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in 1856,
reviews, translations, a report on Deep Sea Soundings, and ten
scientific memoirs.
The most important of the unfinished work consists of the long-delayed
"Oceanic Hydrozoa," the "Manual of Comparative Anatomy," and a report on
Fisheries. The rest of the unfinished programme shows the usual
commixture of technical studies in anatomy and paleontology, with essays
on the philosophical and educational bearings of his work. On the one
hand are memoirs of Daphnia, Nautilus, and the Herring, the affinities
of the Paleozoic Crustacea, the Ascidian Catalogue and Positive
Histology; on the other, the Literature of the Drift, a review of the
present state of philosophical anatomy, and a scheme for arranging the
Explanatory Catalogue to serve as an introductory textbook to the Jermyn
Street lectures and the paleontological demonstrations. Here, too, would
fall a proposed "Letter on the Study of Comparative Anatomy," to do for
those subjects what Henslow had done in his "Letter" for Botany.
In addition to the fact of his being forced to take up Paleontology, it
was perhaps the philosophic breadth of view with which he regarded his
subject at any time, and the desire of getting to the bottom of each
subsidiary problem arising from it, that made him for many years seem
constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly off at a tangent
from the line in which he was assured of unrivalled success did he but
devote to it his undivided powers. But he was prepared to endure the
charge of desultoriness with equanimity. In part, he was still studying
the whole field of biological science before he would claim to be a
master in one department; in part, he could not yet tell to what post he
might succeed when he left--as he fully expected to leave--the
Professorship at Jermyn Street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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