[The Royal Medal was conferred on November 30, and the medallists were entertained at the anniversary dinner of the Society on that day.  In the words with which the President, the Earl of Rosse, accompanied the presentation of the medal, “it is not difficult,” writes Sir M. Foster, “reading between the lines, to recognise the appreciation of a new spirit of anatomical inquiry, not wholly free from a timorous apprehension as to its complete validity.” ("In these papers (on the Medusae) you have for the first time fully developed their structure, and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their classification.”  “In your second paper ‘On the Anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma,’ the phenomena, etc., have received the most ingenious and elaborate elucidation, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology.”  See “Royal Society” Obituary Notices volume 59 page 1.) For the difference between this and the labours of the greatest English comparative anatomist of the time, whose detailed work was of the highest value, but whose generalisations and speculations, based on the philosophy of Oken, proved barren and fruitless, lay in the fact that Huxley, led to it doubtless by his solitary readings in his Charing Cross days, had taken up the method of Von Baer and Johannes Muller, then almost unknown, or at least unused in England—­“the method which led the anatomist to face his problems in the spirit in which the physicist faced his.”

He had been warned by Forbes not to speak too strongly about the dilatoriness of the Government in the matter of the grant, so he writes:] “I will ‘roar you like any sucking dove’ at the dinner, though I felt tempted otherwise.” [On December 1 he tells how he carried out this advice.]

My dear Forbes,

You will, I know, like to learn how I got on yesterday.  The President’s address to me had been drawn up by Bell.  It was, of course, too flattering, but he had taken hold of the right points in my work—­at least I thought so.

Bunsen spoke very well for Humboldt.

There was a capital congregation at the dinner—­sixty or seventy Fellows there...

When it came to my turn to return thanks, I believe I made a very tolerable speechification, at least everybody says so.  Lord Rosse had alluded to “science having to take care of itself in this country,” and in winding up I gave them a small screed upon that text.  That you may see I kept your caution in mind, I will tell you as nearly as may be what I said.  I told them that I could not conceive that anything I had hitherto done merited the honour of that day (I looked so preciously meek over this), but that I was glad to be able to say that I had so much unpublished material as to make me hopeful of one day diminishing the debt.  I then said,