Among his schemes of the early ’80’s, there was actually commenced a work on the principles of Mammalian Anatomy and an Elementary Treatise on the Vertebrata.  The former exists in the shape of a number of drawings with very brief notes, the latter to a slight extent only in manuscript.  In the former, intended for the medical student and as a means of familiarising him with the anatomical “tree” as distinct from its surgical “leaves,” your father once again returned to the skull, and he leaves a scheme for a revised terminology of its nerve exits worthy his best and most clear-headed endeavours of the past.  (Concerning this he wrote to Professor Howes in 1890 when giving him permission to denote two papers which he was about to present to the Zoological Society, as the first which emanated from the Huxley Research Laboratory]:—­“Pray do as you think best about the nomenclature.  I remember when I began to work at the skull it seemed a hopeless problem, and years elapsed before I got hold of the clue.” [And six weeks later, he writes]:—­“You are always welcome to turn anything of mine to account, though I vow I do not just now recollect anything about the terms you mention.  If you were to examine me in my own papers, I believe I should be plucked.”) [And well do I remember how, in the ’80’s, both in the class-room and in conversation, he would emphasise the fact that the hypoglossus nerve roots of the mammal arise serially with the ventral roots of the spinal nerves, little thinking that the discovery by Froriep, in 1886, of their dorsal ganglionated counterparts, would establish the actual homology between the two, and by leading to the conclusion that though actual vertebrae do not contribute to the formation of the mammalian skull, its occipital region is of truncal origin, mark the most revolutionary advance in cranial morphology since his own of 1856.

Much of the final zoological work of his life lay with the Bony Fishes, and he leaves unfinished (indeed only just commenced) a memoir embodying a new scheme of classification of these, which shows that he was intending to do for them what he did for Birds in the most active period of his career.  It was my good fortune to have helped as a hodman in the study of these creatures, with a view to a Text-book we were to have written conjointly, and as I realise what he was intending to make out of the dry facts, I am filled with grief at the thought of what we must have lost.  His classification was based on the labours of years, as testified by a vast accumulation of rough notes and sketches, and as a conspicuous feature of it there stands the embodiment under one head of all those fishes having the swim-bladder in connection with the auditory organ by means of a chain of ossicles—­a revolutionary arrangement, which later, in the hands of the late Dr. Sagemahl, and by his introduction of the famous term—­“Ostariophyseae,” has done more than all else of recent years to clear the Ichthyological air.  Your father had anticipated