[The question of the pedicle comes up again when he simplifies some of Parker’s results as to the development of the Columella auris in the Frog.] “Your suprahyomandibular is nothing but the pedicle of the suspensorium over again.  It has nothing whatever to do with the Columella auris...The whole thing will come out as simply as possible without any of your coalescences and combotherations.  How you will hate me and the pedicle.”

[Tracing the development of the columella was a long business, but it grew clearer as young frogs of various ages were examined.] “Don’t be aggravated with yourself,” [he writes to Parker in July,] “it’s tough work, this here Frog.” [And on August 5:] “I have worked over Toad and I have worked over Frog, and I tell an obstinate man that s.h.m. [suprahyomandibular] is a figment—­or a vessel, whichever said obstinate man pleases.” [The same letter contains what he calls his final views on the columella, but by the end of the year he has gone further, and writes:—­]

Be prepared to bust-up with all the envy of which your malignant nature is capable.  The problem of the vertebrate skull is solved.  Fourteen segments or thereabouts in Amphioxus; all but one (barring possibilities about the ear capsule) aborted in higher vertebrata.  Skull and brain of Amphioxus shut up like an opera-hat in higher vertebrata.  So! (Sketch in illustration.)

P.S.—­I am sure you will understand the whole affair from this.  Probably published it already in “Nature!”

[A letter to the “Times” of July 8, 1874, on women’s education, was evoked by the following circumstances.  Miss Jex Blake’s difficulties in obtaining a medical education have already been referred to.  A further discouragement was her rejection at the Edinburgh examination.  Her papers, however, were referred to Huxley, who decided that certain answers were not up to the standard.]

As Miss Jex Blake may possibly think that my decision was influenced by prejudice against her cause, allow me to add that such prejudice as I labour under lies in the opposite direction.  Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigour and capacity.

We have heard a great deal lately about the physical disabilities of women.  Some of these alleged impediments, no doubt, are really inherent in their organisation, but nine-tenths of them are artificial—­the products of their modes of life.  I believe that nothing would tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness, and that “over-stimulation of the emotions” which, in plainer-spoken days,