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
I am very glad to hear about Brown Sequard; he is a thoroughly good man,
and told me it was worth while to come all the way to Oxford to hear the
Bishop pummelled.
[In the above-mentioned letter to the "Scotsman" of January 24 he
expresses his unfeigned satisfaction at the fulfilment of the three
objects of his address, namely, to state fully and fairly his
conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while
feeling assured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable
part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and
unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the
dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise
reach, in the certainty of a violent attack by [the 'Witness'."
The applause of the audience, he says, afforded him genuine
satisfaction,] "because it bids me continue in the faith on which I
acted, that a man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he
knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good-will and
the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his
fellow-men."
[About this time a new field of interest was opened out to him, closely
connected with, indeed, and completing, the ape question. Sir Charles
Lyell was engaged in writing his "Antiquity of Man," and asked Huxley to
supply him with various anatomical data touching the ape question, and
later to draw him a diagram illustrating the peculiarities of the newly
discovered Neanderthal skull as compared with other skulls. He points
out in his letters to Lyell that the range of cranial capacity between
the highest and the lowest German--"one of the mediatised princes, I
suppose" [The minor princes of Germany, whose territories were annexed
to larger states, and who thus exchanged a direct for a mediate share in
the imperial government.--or the Himalayan or Peruvian, is almost 100
per cent; in absolute amount twice as much as the difference between
that of the largest simian and the smallest human capacity, so that in
seeking an ordinal difference between man and the apes, "it would
certainly be well to let go the head, though I am afraid it does not
mend matters much to lay hold of the foot."
And on January 25, 1862:--]
I have been skull-measuring all day at the College of Surgeons. The
NEANDERTHAL SKULL may be described as a slightly exaggerated
modification of one of the two types (and the lower) of Australian
skulls.
After the fashion of accounting for the elephant of old, I suppose it
will be said that it was imported. But luckily the differences, though
only of degree, are rather too marked for this hypothesis.
I only wish I had a clear six months to work at the subject. Little did
I dream what the undertaking to arrange your three woodcuts would lead
to. It will come in the long-run, I believe, to a new ethnological
method, new modes of measurement, a new datum line, and new methods of
registration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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