facts, but he definitely used the word evolution to convey his ideas.  On the other hand, he was firmly convinced that such evolution was confined within the great groups.  For each group there was a typical structure, and modifications by defect or excess of the parts of the definite archetype gave rise to the different members of the group.  Moreover, he confined this evolution in the strictest possible way to each group; he did not believe that what was called anamorphosis—­the transition of a lower type into a higher type—­ever occurred.  To use his own words: 

“If, however, all Cephalous Mollusca, i.e., all Cephalopoda, Gasteropoda, and Lamellibranchiata, be only modifications by excess or defect of the parts of a definite archetype, then, I think, it follows as a necessary consequence, that no anamorphosis takes place in this group.  There is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete evolution of one type.  It may indeed be a matter of very grave consideration whether true anamorphosis ever occurs in the whole animal kingdom.  If it do, then the doctrine that every natural group is organised after a definite archetype, a doctrine which seems to me as important for zooelogy as the theory of definite proportions for chemistry, must be given up.”

It is of great historical interest to notice how closely actual consideration of the facts of the animal kingdom took zooelogists to an idea of evolution, and yet how far they were from it as we hold it now.  It is fashionable at the present time to attempt to depreciate the immense change introduced by Darwin into zooelogical speculation, and the method employed is largely partial quotation, or reference to the kind of ideas found in papers such as this memoir by Huxley.  The comparison between the types of the great groups and the combining proportions of the chemical elements shows clearly that Huxley regarded the structural plans of the great groups as properties necessary and inherent in these groups, just as the property of a chemical element to combine with another chemical substance only in a fixed proportion is necessary and inherent in the existing conception of it.  There was no glimmer of the idea that these types were not inherent, but merely historical results of a long and slow series of changes produced by the interaction of the varied conditions of life and the intrinsic qualities of living material.

In two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1854 and 1855, the one on “The Common Plan of Animal Forms,” the other on “The Zooelogical Arguments Adduced in Favour of the Progressive Development of Animal Life in Time,” show, so far as the published abstracts go, the same condition of mind.  The idea of progressive development of all life from common forms was not unknown to Huxley and his contemporaries, but was rejected by them.  In the first of these two lectures he took four great groups of animals,