are few more interesting chapters in genealogical zooelogy than those which reveal the relationship between Amphioxus and fish on the one hand, and Ascidians on the other; for fish are vertebrates, and Ascidians, on the old view, are lowly invertebrates.  The details of these relationships have been made known to us by the brilliant investigations of several Germans, by Kowalevsky, a Russian, by the Englishmen Ray Lankester and Willey, and by several Americans and Frenchmen.  But behind the work of all these lies the pioneer work of Huxley, who first gathered the group of Ascidians together, and in a series of masterly investigations described its typical structure.

Huxley’s next great piece of work was embodied in a memoir published in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1853, and which remains to the present day a model of luminous description and far-reaching ideas.  It was a treatise on the structure of the great group of molluscs, and displays in a striking fashion his method of handling anatomical facts, and deducing from them the great underlying principles of construction.  The shell-fish with which he dealt specially were those distinguished as cephalous, because, unlike creatures such as the oyster and mussel, they had something readily comparable with the head of vertebrates.  He began by pointing out what problems he hoped to solve.  The anatomy of many of the cephalous molluscs was known, but the relation of structures present in one to structures present in another group had not been settled.

“It is not settled whether the back of a cuttle-fish answers to the dorsal or ventral surface of a gasteropod.  It is not decided whether the arms and funnels of the one have or have not their homologues in the other.  The dorsal integument of a Doris and the cloak of a whelk are both called ‘mantle,’ without any evidence to show that they are really homologous.  Nor do very much more definite notions seem to have prevailed with regard to the archetypal molluscous form, and the mode in which (if such an archetype exist) it becomes modified in the different secondary types.”

He had taken from the surface of the sea a number of transparent shell-fish, and had been able to study the structure and arrangement of their organs “by simple inspection, without so much as disturbing a single beat of their hearts.”  From knowledge gained in this fashion, and from ordinary dissection of a number of common snails, cephalopods, and pteropods, he was able to describe in a very complete way the anatomical structure of cephalous molluscs.  The next natural step, he stated, would have been to describe the embryonic development of the organs of these different creatures in order that a true knowledge might be gained of what were the homologous or really corresponding parts in each.  Having had no opportunity to make such embryological studies for himself, he fell back on numerous accounts of development by Koelliker,