does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her.  And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains.

To speak out thus was one side of his passion for veracity.  When it was a matter of demonstrable truth, he refused to be intimidated by great names.  Already, in his Croonian lecture of 1858, “On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull,” he had challenged, and by direct morphological investigation overthrown, the theory of Oken, adopted and enlarged upon by Owen, that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column.  Again, the great name of Owen, that jealous king of the anatomical world, had in 1857 supported the assertion, so contrary to the investigations of Huxley himself and of other anatomists, that certain anatomical features of the brain are peculiar to the genus Homo, and are a ground for placing that genus separately from all other mammals—­in a division, Archencephala, apart from and superior to the rest.  Huxley thereupon re-investigated the whole question, and soon satisfied himself that these structures were not peculiar to man, but are common to all the higher and many of the lower apes.  This led him to study the whole question of the structural relations of man to the next lower existing forms.  Without embarking on controversy, he embodied his conclusions in his teaching.

Thus, in 1860, he was well prepared to follow up Darwin’s words in the Origin of Species, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,” and to furnish proofs in the field of Development and Vertebrate Anatomy, which were not among Darwin’s many specialities.

When Owen, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, repeated his former assertions, he publicly took up the challenge.  On the technical side, a series of dissections undertaken by himself, Rolleston, and Flower displayed the structures for all to see; on the popular side, Huxley delivered in 1860 a course of public lectures which were the basis of his book, Man’s Place in Nature, above mentioned.

Here the principle is actively exemplified:  speak out fearlessly at the right moment to strike down that which is demonstrably false.  It is the counterpart to the other aspect of veracity which will not say “I believe” to an unverified assertion.  These two aspects of the same principle, as has been seen, developed hand in hand in his early career; but it was the active challenge to ill-based authority which, by its courage, not to say audacity, first attracted public notice and public abuse.  The other, the apparently negative aspect, came into general notice only after 1869.  Its very reserves, however, resting on a statement of reasons for finding the testimony to certain doctrines insufficient, had long provoked assaults from the upholders of these doctrines, which made no less call upon his courage and endurance.  As a philosophic position, however, it was not formally