Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/796

778 of classic value, had been driven to earn his bread as an ophthalmic surgeon, and an even greater physiologist, William Bowman, was following the same course. There was no opening in physiology for the young student at Charing Cross, and he was driven by stress of circumstances to morphological rather than to strictly physiological problems; but it was not until long after, when he had achieved eminence as a morphologist, that he finally abandoned his old wish to hold a physiological chair.

Looking back on the past, we may now be glad that circumstances were against his wishes; for (though in every branch of science there is need at all times of a great man) there was at the middle of the century, in the early fifties, a special need in morphology for a man of Huxley's mold. Richard Owen was then dominant, and it is an acknowledged feature of Owen's work that in it there was a sudden leap from most admirable detailed descriptive labor to dubious speculations, based for the most part on, or at least akin to, the philosophy of Oken. Of the "new morphology" in which Johannes Müller was leading the way, and the criteria of which had been furnished by the labors of von Baer, there was then but little in England save, perhaps, what was to be found in the expositions of Carpenter. Of this new morphology, by which this branch of biology was brought into a line with other exact sciences, and the note of which was not to speculate on guiding forces and on the realization of ideals, but to determine the laws of growth by the careful investigation, as of so many special problems, of what parts of different animals, as shown among other ways by the mode of their development, were really the same or alike, Huxley became at once an apostle. His very first work, that on the Medusæ, wrought out amid the distractions of ship life, written on a lonely vessel plowing its solitary way amid almost unknown seas, away from books and the communion of his fellow-workers, bears the same marks which characterize his subsequent memoirs; it is the effort of a clear mind striving to see its way through difficult problems, bent on holding fast only to that which could be proved. This is not the occasion to insist in detail on the value of the like morphological work which he produced in the fifties and the sixties, or to show how he applied to other forms of animal life, to echinoderms, to tunicates, to arthropods, to molluscs, and last though not least to vertebrates, the same method of inquiry which guided the work on the Medusæ. Nor need I dwell on the many valuable results which he gained for science by attacking in the same spirit the problems offered by the remains of extinct forms. Moreover, he strengthened the effect of his own labors by admirable expositions of the results of others. Further, unlike his great predecessor, who formed no school and had few if any disciples, it was