the Vertebrates, the Articulata, the Mollusca, and the Radiata, and explained what was the archetype of each.  He shewed the distinctiveness of each plan of structure, and then discussed the relations of the ideas suggested by Von Baer to these archetypes.  He stated explicitly that while the adult forms were quite unlike one another, there were traces of a common plan to be derived from a study of their embryonic development.  Such a trace of a common plan he had himself suggested when he compared the foundation-membranes of the Medusae with the first foundation-membranes of vertebrate embryos.  This was going a long way towards modern ideas; but he stopped short, and gave no hint that he believed in the possibility of the development of one plan from a lower or simpler plan.  The second lecture dealt with the kind of ideas which were crystallised in the popular but striking work of Chambers, entitled Vestiges of Creation.  Chambers attacked the theological view that all animals and plants had been created at the beginning of the world, and maintained that geological evidence showed the occurrence of a progressive development of animal life.  Huxley, like all zooelogists and geologists who knew anything of the occurrence of fossils in the rocks of past ages, agreed with the general truth of the conception that a progressive development had occurred which showed that the species now existing were represented in the oldest rocks by species now extinct.  But the examples he brought forward were all limited to evolution within the great groups, and did not affect his idea that archetypes were fixed and did not pass into each other.  Moreover, he summed up strongly against the suggestion that there was any parallel between the succession of life in the past and the forms assumed by modern animals in their embryological development.  So far as the present writer is able to judge from study of the literature of this period, the possibility of evolution was present in an active form in the minds of Huxley and of his contemporaries, and in an extraordinary way they brought together evidence which afterwards became of firstrate importance; but the idea in its modern sense was rejected by them.

In 1854 Huxley’s uncomfortable period of probation came to an end.  Edward Forbes, who held the posts of Palaeontologist to the Geological Survey, and Lecturer on General Natural History at the Metropolitan School of Science Applied to Mining and the Arts, vacated these on his appointment to the Chair of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh, and Sir H. De La Beche, the then Director-General of the Geological Survey, offered both the posts to Huxley—­who in June and July of that year had given lectures at the school in place of Forbes.  Huxley says himself: