my return to England in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet of separate copies awaited me.  When I hear some of my young friends complain of want of sympathy and encouragement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was not the least valuable part of my education.”

This first successful paper was a memoir On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae, and was sent at Captain Stanley’s suggestion to that officer’s father, the Bishop of Norwich, who communicated it to the Royal Society.  It is a curious circumstance that Huxley, who afterwards met with so virulent opposition from bishops, owed his first public success to one of them.  Professor Sir Michael Foster writes of this period in Huxley’s life: 

“The career of many a successful man has shewn that obstacles often prove the mother of endeavour, and never was this lesson clearer than in the case of Huxley.  Working amidst a host of difficulties, in want of room, in want of light, seeking to unravel the intricacies of minute structure with a microscope lashed to secure steadiness, cramped within a tiny cabin, jostled by the tumult of a crowded ship’s life, with the scantiest supply of books of reference, with no one at hand of whom he could take counsel on the problems opening up before him, he gathered for himself during these four years a large mass of accurate, important, and in most cases novel, observations and illustrated them with skilful, pertinent drawings.  Even his intellectual solitude had its good effects:  it drove him to ponder over the new facts which came before him, and all his observations were made alive with scientific thought.”

Afterwards, in England, he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society for this memoir on Medusae, sharing this supreme distinction of scientific England with men so illustrious as Joule, the discoverer of the relation between force and heat, Stokes, the great investigator of optical physics, and Humboldt, the traveller, all of whom received medals in the same year.  In making the presentation to Huxley, the Earl of Rosse, then President of the Royal Society, declared: 

“In those papers you have for the first time fully developed their structure (that of the Medusae), and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their classification.  In your second paper, on the anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma, the phenomena have received the most ingenious and elaborate elucidations, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology.”

Many reasons make it difficult for us to realise, now, the singular novelty and importance of Huxley’s memoir on the Medusae.  The first is a reason which often prevents great discoveries in almost every