Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3Huxley, Thomas Henry
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Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
Much of the final zoological work of his life lay with the Bony Fishes,
and he leaves unfinished (indeed only just commenced) a memoir
embodying a new scheme of classification of these, which shows that he
was intending to do for them what he did for Birds in the most active
period of his career. It was my good fortune to have helped as a hodman
in the study of these creatures, with a view to a Text-book we were to
have written conjointly, and as I realise what he was intending to make
out of the dry facts, I am filled with grief at the thought of what we
must have lost. His classification was based on the labours of years,
as testified by a vast accumulation of rough notes and sketches, and as
a conspicuous feature of it there stands the embodiment under one head
of all those fishes having the swim-bladder in connection with the
auditory organ by means of a chain of ossicles--a revolutionary
arrangement, which later, in the hands of the late Dr. Sagemahl, and by
his introduction of the famous term--"Ostariophyseae," has done more
than all else of recent years to clear the Ichthyological air. Your
father had anticipated this unpublished, and in a proposal to unite the
Herrings and Pikes into a single group, the "Clupesoces," he had
further given promise of a new system, based on the study of the
structure of the fins, jaws, and reproductive organs of the Bony
Fishes, the classifications of which are still largely chaotic, which
would have been as revolutionary as it was rational. New terms both in
taxonomy and anatomy were contemplated, and in part framed. His
published terms "Elasmo-" and "Cysto-arian" are the adjective form of
two--far-reaching and significant--which give an idea of what was to
have come. Similarly, the spinose fin-rays were to have been termed
"acanthonemes," the branching and multiarticulate "arthronemes," and
those of the more elementary and "adipose fin" type "protonemes": and
had he lived to complete the task, I question whether it would not have
excelled his earlier achievements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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