T.H.  Huxley.

[In 1858 he read three papers at the Geological and two at the Linnean; he lectured (February 15) on Fish and Fisheries at South Kensington, and on May 21 gave a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on “The Phenomena of Gemmation.”  He wrote an article for “Todd’s Cyclopaedia,” on the “Tegumentary Organs,” an elaborate paper, as Sir M. Foster says, on a histological theme, to which, as to others of the same class on the Teeth and the Corpuscular Tactus ("Q.  J. Micr.  Science” 1853-4), he had been “led probably by the desire, which only gradually and through lack of fulfilment left him, to become a physiologist rather than a naturalist.”

No less important was his more general work for science.  Physiological study in England at this time was dominated by transcendental notions.  To put first principles on a sound experimental basis was the aim of the new leaders of scientific thought.  To this end Huxley made two contributions in 1858—­one on the general subject of the cell theory, the other on the particular question of the development of the skull.  “In a striking ‘Review of the Cell Theory,’” says Sir M. Foster, “which appeared in the “British and Foreign Medical Review” in 1858, a paper which more than one young physiologist at the time read with delight, and which even to-day may be studied with no little profit, he, in this subject as in others, drove the sword of rational inquiry through the heart of conceptions, metaphysical and transcendental, but dominant.”

Of this article Professor E. Ray Lankester also writes:—­

...Indeed it is a fundamental study in morphology.  The extreme interest and importance of the views put forward in that article may be judged of by the fact that although it is forty years since it was published, and although our knowledge of cell structure has made immense progress during those forty years, yet the main contention of that article, namely that cells are not the cause but the result of organisation—­in fact, are, as he says, to the tide of life what the line of shells and weeds on the seashore is to the tide of the living sea—­is even now being re-asserted, and in a slightly modified form is by very many cytologists admitted as having more truth in it than the opposed view and its later outcomes, to the effect that the cell is the unit of life in which and through which alone living matter manifests its activities.

The second was his Croonian Lecture of 1858, “On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull,” in which he demonstrated from the embryological researches of Rathke and others, that after the first step the whole course of development in the segments of the skull proceeded on different lines from that of the vertebral column; and that Oken’s imaginative theory of the skull as modified vertebrae, logically complete down to a strict parallel between the subsidiary head-bones and the limbs attached to the spine, outran the facts of a definite structure common to all vertebrates