For the rest...the part I have to play is not to found a new school of thought or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old schools.  We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement.  But there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between free thought and traditional authority.  One or other will have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as side issues vast political and social troubles.  I have no more doubt that free thought will win in the long run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent system, embracing human life and the world as one harmonious whole.  But this organisation will be the work of generations of men, and those who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delusions.  I may be able to help a little in this direction—­perhaps I may have helped already.  For the present, however, I am disposed to draw myself back entirely into my own branch of physical science.  There is enough and to spare for me to do in that line, and, for years to come, I do not mean to be tempted out of it.

[Strangely enough, this was the one thing he was destined not to do.  Official work multiplied about him.  From 1870 to 1884 only two years passed without his serving on one or two Royal Commissions.  He was Secretary of the Royal Society from 1871 to 1880, and President from 1883 to his retirement, owing to ill-health, in 1885.  He became Dean as well as Professor of Biology in the College of Science, and Inspector of Fisheries.  Though he still managed to find some time for anatomical investigations, and would steal a precious hour or half-hour by driving back from the Home Office to his laboratory at South Kensington before returning home to St. John’s Wood, the amount of such work as he was able to publish could not be very great.

His most important contributions during this decennium (writes Sir M. Foster) were in part continuations of his former labours, such as the paper and subsequent full memoir on Stagonolepis, which appeared in 1875 and 1877, and papers on the Skull.  The facts that he called a communication to the Royal Society, in 1875 (written 1874.), on Amphioxus, a preliminary note, and that a paper read to the Zoological Society in 1876, on Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked Number 1 of the series of Contributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before him the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when opportunity offered; but, alas! the opportunity which came was small, the preliminary note had no full successor, and Number 1 was only followed, and that after an interval of seven years, by a brief Number 2.  A paper “On the Characters of the Pelvis,” in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society,”