[It was not long, however, before Lyell’s prophecy began to come true.  In June Huxley writes:—­]

It is no use letting other people look after the journal.  I find unless I revise every page of it, it goes wrong.

[But in July 1863 he definitely ceased to contribute:—­]

I did not foresee all this crush of work [he writes], when the “Review” was first started, or I should not have pledged myself to any share in supplying it. [Moreover, with the appointment of paid editors that year, it seemed to him] that the working editors with the credit and pay must take the responsibility of all the commissariat of the “Review” upon their shoulders.

Two years later, in 1865, the “Review” came to an end.  As Mr. Murray, the publisher, remarked, quarterlies did not pay; and this quarterly became still more financially unsound after the over-worked volunteers, who both edited and contributed, gave place to paid editors.

But Huxley was not satisfied with one defeat.  The quarterly scheme had failed; he now tried if he could not serve science better by returning to a more frequent and more popular form of periodical.  From 1863 to 1866 he was concerned with the “Reader,” a weekly issue (The committee also included Professor Cairns, F. Galton, W.F.  Pollock, and J. Tyndall.); but this also was too heavy a burden to be borne in addition to his other work.  However, the labour expended in these ventures was not wholly thrown away.  The experience thus gained at last enabled the present Sir Norman Lockyer, who acted as science editor for the “Reader,” to realise what had so long been aimed at by the establishment of “Nature” in 1869.

Apart from his contributions to the species question and the foundation of a scientific review, Huxley published in 1860 only two special monographs ("On Jacare and Caiman,” and “On the Mouth and Pharynx of the Scorpion,” already mentioned as read in the previous year), but he read “Further Observations on Pyrosoma” at the Linnean Society, and was busy with paleontological work, the results of which appeared in three papers the following year, the most important of which was the Memoir called a “Preliminary Essay on the Arrangement of the Devonian Fishes,” in the report of the Geological Survey, “which,” says Sir M. Foster, “though entitled a Preliminary Essay, threw an entirely new light on the affinities of these creatures, and, with the continuation published later, in 1866, still remains a standard work.”

The question of the admission of ladies to the learned societies was already being mooted, and a letter to Sir Charles Lyell gives his ideas thus early not only on this point, but on the general question of women’s education.]

March 17, 1860.

My dear Sir Charles,

To use the only forcible expression, I “twig” your meaning perfectly, but I venture to think the parable does not apply.  For the Geological Society is not, to my mind, a place of education for students, but a place of discussion for adepts; and the more it is applied to the former purpose the less competent it must become to fulfil the latter—­its primary and most important object.