Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work. Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

substance of life. These types were independent of each other, and had been so since the beginning of things. Anatomists were concerned chiefly with systematic work, with detecting and recording the slight differences that existed among the numbers of animals grouped around each type. No attempt was made to see connection between type and type, for where these had been separately created there was nothing to connect them except possibly some idea in the mind of the Creator. This apparently barren attitude to nature was stronger in men's minds because it had inspired the colossal achievements of Cuvier, a genius who, under whatever misconceptions he had worked, would have added greatly to knowledge. As we have seen in the first chapter, Huxley, through Wharton Jones, and through his own reading, had been brought under the more modern German thought of Johannes Mueller and Von Baer. He had learned to study the problems of living nature in the spirit of a physicist making investigations into dead nature. In the anatomy of animals, as in the structure of rocks and crystals, there were to be sought out "laws of growth" and shaping and moulding influences which accounted for the form of the structures. To use the technical term, he was a morphologist: one who studied the architecture of animals not merely in a spirit of admiring wonder, but with the definite idea of finding out the guiding principles which had determined these shapes.

      Not only was the prevailing method of investigation faulty, but actual knowledge of a large part of the animal kingdom was extremely limited. In the minds of most zoölogists the animal kingdom was divided into two great groups: the vertebrates and invertebrates. The vertebrate, or back-boned, animals were well known; comparatively speaking they are all built upon the type of man; and human anatomists, who indeed made up the greater number of all anatomists, using their exact knowledge of the human body, had studied many other vertebrates with minute care, and, from man to fishes, had arranged living vertebrates very much in the modern order. But the invertebrates were a vague and ill-assorted heap of animals. It was not recognised that among them there were many series of different grades of ascending complexity, and there was no well-known form to serve as a standard of comparison for all the others in the fashion that the body of man served as a standard of comparison for all vertebrates. Here and there, a few salient types such as insects and snails had been picked out, but knowledge of them helped but little with a great many of the invertebrates. The great Linnæus had divided the animal kingdom into four groups of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, but for the invertebrates he had done no more than to pick out the insects as one group and to call everything else "Vermes" or worms. The insects included all creatures possessed of an external skeleton or hard skin divided into jointed segments, and included forms so different as insects, spiders, crabs, and lobsters. But Vermes included all the members of the animal kingdom that were neither vertebrates nor insects. Cuvier advanced a little. He got rid of the comprehensive title Vermes—the label of the rubbish-heap of zoölogists. He divided animals into four great subkingdoms: Vertebrates, Mollusca, Articulata, Radiata. These names, however, only covered very superficial resemblances among the animals designated by them. The word Mollusca only meant that the creatures grouped together had soft bodies, unsupported by internal or external articulated skeletons; and this character, or, rather, absence of character, was applied alike to many totally dissimilar creatures. The term Articulata included not only Linnæus's insects but a number of soft-skinned, apparently jointed, worm-like animals such as the leech and earthworm. Lastly, the name Radiata meant no more than that the organs of the creatures so designated were more or less disposed around a centre, as the sepals and petals of a flower are grouped around the central pistil; and it included animals so different as the starfish and sea-anemones and Medusæ. The names used in the classification were not only loosely applied but were based on the most superficial observation, and took no account of the intimate structures of the tissues and organs of the animals. With slight modifications, due to individual taste or special knowledge of small groups, later writers had followed Linnæus and Cuvier.

      It was with a view of the animal kingdom not much clearer than this that Huxley began his work on the Medusæ of the tropic seas. He began to study them no doubt simply because they were among the most abundant of the animals that could be obtained from the ship. He made endless dissections and drawings, and, above all, studied their minute anatomy with the microscope. They were all placed among Cuvier's Radiata, but, as Huxley said in the first line of his memoir: