Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2 eBook

Leonard Huxley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 474 pages of information about Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2.

Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2 eBook

Leonard Huxley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 474 pages of information about Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2.

Item.

If you have not already begun to macerate him, do look for the “marsupial” fibro-cartilages, which I have mentioned in my “Manual,” but the existence of which blasphemers have denied.  I found them again at once in both Mr. and Mrs. Vulpes.  You spot them immediately by the pectineus which is attached to them.

The dog-fox’s caecum is so different from the vixen’s that Gray would have made distinct genera of them.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

4 Marlborough Place, N.W., May 2, 1880.

My dear Fayrer,

I am greatly obliged for the skulls, and I hope you will offer my best thanks to your son for the trouble he has taken in getting them.

The “fox” is especially interesting because it is not a fox, by any manner of means, but a big jackal with some interesting points of approximation towards the cuons.

I do not see any locality given along with the specimens.  Can you supply it?

I have got together some very curious evidence of the wider range of variability of the Indian jackal, and the “fox” which your son has sent is the most extreme form in one direction I have met with.

I wish I could get some examples from the Bombay and Madras Presidencies and from Ceylon, as well as from Central India.  Almost all I have seen yet are from Bengal.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Between the two lectures on the Dog, mentioned above, on April 9, Huxley delivered a Friday evening discourse, at the same place, “On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species” ("Collected Essays” 2 227).  Reviewing the history of the theory of evolution in the twenty-one years that had elapsed since the “Origin of Species” first saw the light in 1859, he did not merely dwell on the immense influence the “Origin” had exercised upon every field of biological inquiry.] “Mere insanities and inanities have before now swollen to portentous size in the course of twenty years.”  “History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.” [There was actual danger lest a new generation should] “accept the main doctrines of the “Origin of Species” with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, years ago, rejected them.”

[So dire a consummation, he declared, must be prevented by unflinching criticism, the essence of the scientific spirit,] “for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

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Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.