CHAPTER 2.11.

1879.

[Much of the work noted down for 1878 reappears in my father’s list for 1879.  He was still at work upon, or meditating his Crayfish, his Introduction to Psychology, the Spirula Memoir, and a new edition of the Elementary Physiology.  Professor H.N.  Martin writes about the changes necessary for adapting the “Practical Biology” to American needs; the article on Harvey was waiting to be put into permanent form.  Besides giving an address at the Working Men’s College, he lectured on Sensation and the Uniformity of the Sensiferous Organs ("Collected Essays” 6.), at the Royal Institution, Friday evening, March 7; and on Snakes, both at the Zoological Gardens, June 5, and at the London Institution, December 1.  On February 3 he read a paper at the Royal Society on “The Characters of the Pelvis in the Mammalia, and the Conclusions respecting the Origin of Mammals which may be based on them”; and published in “Nature” for November 6 a paper on “Certain Errors Respecting the Structure of the Heart, attributed to Aristotle.”

Great interest attaches to this paper.  He had always wondered how Aristotle, in dissecting a heart, had come to assert that it contained only three chambers; and the desire to see for himself what stood in the original, uncommented on by translators who were not themselves anatomists, was one of the chief reasons (I think the wish to read the Greek Testament in the original was another) which operated in making him take up the study of Greek late in middle life.  His practice was to read in his book until he had come to ten new words; these he looked out, parsed, and wrote down together with their chief derivatives.  This was his daily portion.

When at last he grappled with the passage in question, he found that Aristotle had correctly described what he saw under the special conditions of his dissection, when the right auricle actually appears as he described it, an enlargement of the “great vein.”  So that this, at least, ought to be removed from the list of Aristotle’s errors.  The same is shown to be the case with his statements about respiration.  His own estimate of Aristotle as a physiologist is between the panegyric of Cuvier and the depreciation of Lewes:  “he carried science a step beyond the point at which he found it; a meritorious, but not a miraculous, achievement.”  And it will interest scholars to know that from his own experience as a lecturer, Huxley was inclined to favour the theory that the original manuscripts of the “Historia Animalium,” with their mingled accuracy and absurdity, were notes taken by some of his students.  This essay was reprinted in “Science and Culture” page 180.

This year he brought out his second volume of essays on various subjects, written from 1870 to 1878, under the title of “Critiques and Addresses,” and later in the year, his long-delayed and now entirely recast “Introductory Primer” in the Science Primer Series.]