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
[In 1868 he published five scientific memoirs, amongst them his
classification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica"
("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This
creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from
which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years'
labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a
lecture at the Royal Institution, on February 7, "On the Animals which
are most nearly intermediate between Birds and Reptiles."
Of this branch of work Sir M. Foster says: (Obituary Notice "Proceedings
of the Royal Society" volume 59):--
One great consequence of these researches was that science was enriched
by a clear demonstration of the many and close affinities between
reptiles and birds, so that the two henceforward came to be known under
the joint title of Sauropsida, the amphibia being at the same time
distinctly more separated from the reptiles, and their relations to
fishes more clearly signified by the joint title of Ichthyopsida. At the
same time, proof was brought forward that the line of descent of the
Sauropsida clearly diverged from that of the Mammalia, both starting
from some common ancestry. And besides this great generalisation, the
importance of which, both from a classificatory and from an evolutional
point of view, needs no comment, there came out of the same researches
numerous lesser contributions to the advancement of morphological
knowledge, including among others an attempt, in many respects
successful, at a classification of birds.
This work in connection with the reptilian ancestry of birds further
appears in the paleontological papers published in 1869 upon the
Dinosaurs (see Chapter 23), and is referred to in a letter to Haeckel.
His Hunterian lectures on the Invertebrata appeared this year in the
"Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science" (pages 126-129, and
191-201), and in the October number of the same journal appeared his
famous article "On some Organisms living at great depth in the North
Atlantic Ocean," originally delivered before the British Association at
Norwich in this year (1868). The sticky or viscid character of the fresh
mud from the bottom of the Atlantic had already been noticed by Captain
Dayman when making soundings for the Atlantic cable. This stickiness was
apparently due to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent,
gelatinous substance, consisting of minute granules without discoverable
nucleus or membranous envelope, and interspersed with cretaceous
coccoliths. After a description of the structure of this substance and
its chemical reactions, he makes a careful proviso against confounding
the statement of fact in the description and the interpretation which he
proceeds to put upon these facts:--]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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