XI
METHODS OF WORK
Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great trouble in the Navy—namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were opened, to be full of maggots.
His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from one form to the next.
Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms. Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which, in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the Mammalia" (1880)—"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions (begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist) which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon zoological work before he was sixty.
A remark made by Huxley about others is very true of himself—that what matters most is not the microscope, but the man behind it; not the objects seen, but the interpretation of them and their relationships. The outward and the inward eye had the same quickness, the same highly developed sense of form and relationship, backed by a store of living knowledge; so well organized that it could respond at once to any suggestion which would throw light on undiscovered affinities and provide a true base for classification.
While much of his bookwork and writing was done at home, his later anatomical work was done at his laboratory. As official engagements multiplied, his time was much broken into; but he snatched every available moment, often dashing down to South Kensington in a cab for a half-hour of work between two official meetings. His absorption in his studies was intense—as at one time he signs himself to his fellow-worker, W. K. Parker, "Ever yours amphibially," so Jeffery Parker, his demonstrator, who tells the story, came to him with a question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in the investigation of some invertebrate group. "Codfish?" he replied; "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll consider it."
One more note concerning his method of work. His love of visualizing his problems regularly led him to make charts to show geographically, say, the distribution of certain forms of life over the globe, or to illustrate points of history—such, for example, as a coloured map of the Aegean, with fifty-mile circles drawn from the centre of the Cyclades to illustrate the range of Greek civilization as it spread over the shores of Asia and Europe. And as in writing a book he was careful first to plan out the scheme of it and the balance of the parts, so, however much his public addresses gave the impression of being largely impromptu, he had always thought out carefully every word he meant to say. "There is," he said, "no greater danger than the so-called inspiration of the moment, which leads you to say something which is not exactly true, or which you would regret afterwards."
Yet his was not a strong verbal memory. It was essentially a memory for facts; he could tear the heart out of a book as swiftly as a Macaulay, packing the facts into the framework of his knowledge, and always knowing thereafter where to find his facts or verify his references. In his speeches it was the compelling thought seeking expression, and fitting the form of expression exactly to the form of the thought, that brought the meditated words so infallibly and so spontaneously to his lips: they were already welded together in mind. But he had not that kind of memory which, after once reading a page of a book, can recite the whole word for word, whether prose or verse. Single phrases embodying a notable image would remain with him, and remain ready for use as allusive colour or pointed epigram. Many of these were Biblical phrases, for he knew his Bible well, and admired not only the grandeur of thought to be found enshrined in it, but its magnificence as a treasure-house of our English tongue. And, apart from many scientific terms of his invention, he coined divers words and phrases which have enriched our language, such as "Agnostic," "the ladder from the gutter to the university," the descriptions of Positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity," and the Salvation Army methods as "Corybantic Christianity."
His working day began soon after nine, for he was never one of those people who can do hours of work before breakfast. The working day, however, regularly went on until midnight, and, as has been mentioned, was often prolonged by late reading.
The speed with which his mind worked to see through complex questions and spring swiftly to a conclusion was such that he contrived to do four ordinary men's work in a single lifetime. But this swiftness of reaching a conclusion, so useful at most times, was liable sometimes to betray him. If, however, he found that he had made a mistake, he was ready to confess the fact. The most celebrated instance of this was the story of Bathybius. In 1868, while soundings were being made in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable, certain specimens of mud were dredged up. The mud was sticky, owing to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance. This was in fine granules, which possessed neither a nucleus nor a covering membrane. Scattered through it were calcareous coccoliths. Such were the facts; what inference was to be drawn? The only thing this substance resembled was one of the many simple forms of oceanic life recently found and described by the great zoologist Haeckel.
I conceive [wrote Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterize the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphærozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his Monographie der Moneras.
So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up again on the voyage of the Porcupine and examined in a fresh state by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B. Carpenter, but they found no better explanation to give of it. Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the Challenger expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved. Though Haeckel—his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of a close parallel near Greenland in 1876—would not desert Bathybius, the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as witty as it was candid.
Now, Bathybius had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:—
That which interested me in the matter was the apparent analogy of Bathybius with other well-known forms of lower life…. Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with the matter, and if Bathybius were brought up alive from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin's speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.
As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:—
Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.
Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:—
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was sometimes almost terrifying. And in those days also, before custom had hardened him, he was apt to be short with those devoid of any claim to intervene who thrust themselves into his affairs. Salutary as this doubtless was to the really ignorant meddler, there was one occasion, of which I learnt thirty years later, where at bottom the rebuke was not deserved. The sufferer, admittedly devoid of anatomical knowledge, questioned the statement in an early edition of The Elementary Physiology as to the method in which the voice is produced, and propounded a different movement in part of the larynx. The Professor replied to the effect that the writer had better learn some anatomy before challenging the result of careful experiment. But some years later, as a result of further investigation, this same change was made in a new edition of the book. By that time the very name of the critic was forgotten. But if he and his suggestion had been remembered, I am inclined to think that he would have received an amende.