Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/353

Rh to publish such a book at that time was a bold step. But the prophecy with which he concluded the work is coming true.

"After passion and prejudice have died away," he said, "the same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and Andes of the living world—Man. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is, in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvelous endowments of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top—far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the infinite source of truth" ('Collected Essays,' vii., p. 155).

Another important research connected with the work of our Society was his investigation of the structure of the vertebrate skull. Owen had propounded a theory and worked it out most ingeniously that the skull was a complicated elaboration of the anterior part of the back-bone; that it was gradually developed from a preconceived idea or archetype; that it was possible to make out a certain number of vertebrae, and even the separate parts of which they were composed.

Huxley maintained that the archetypal theory was erroneous; and that, instead of being a modification of the anterior part of the primitive representative of the back-bone, the skull is rather an independent growth around and in front of it. Subsequent investigations have strenghtenedstrengthened [sic] this view, which is now generally accepted. This lecture marked an epoch in vertebrate morphology, and the views he enunciated still hold the field.

One of the most interesting parts of Huxley's work, and one specially connected with our Society, was his study of the ethnology of the British Isles. It has also an important practical and political application, because the absurd idea that ethnologically the inhabitants of our islands form three nations—the English, Scotch and Irish—has exercised a malignant effect on some of our statesmen, and is still not without influence on our politics. One of the strongest arguments put forward in favor of Home Rule used to be that the Irish were a 'nation.' In 1887 I attacked this view in some letters to the 'Times,' subsequently published by Quaritch. Nothing is more certain than that there was not a Scot in Scotland till the seventh century; that the east of our island from John 0' Groat's House to Kent is Teutonic; that the most important ethnological line, so far as there is one at all, is not the boundary between England and Scotland, but the north and south watershed which separates the east and west. In Ireland, again, the population is far from homogeneous. Huxley strongly supported the position I had