In the list of work in hand are four paleontological papers, besides the slowly progressing "Manual of Comparative Anatomy." ("On Indian Fossils," on "Cephalaspis and Pteraspis," on "Stagonolepis," and a "Memoir descriptive of Labyrinthodont remains from the Trias and Coal of Britain," which he first treated of in 1858, "clearly establishing for the first time the vertebrate nature of these remains."—Sir M. Foster, Obituary Notice "Proceedings of the Royal Society" 59 55.)
When he went north to deliver his lectures at Edinburgh "On the relation of Man to the Lower Animals," he took the opportunity of examining fossils at Forfar, and lectured also at Glasgow; while at Easter he went to Ireland; on March 15 he was at Dublin, lecturing there on the 25th.
Reference has already been made (in the letter to C. Darwin of May 6, 1862) to the unsatisfactory state of Huxley's health. He was further crippled by neuralgic rheumatism in his arm and shoulder, and to get rid of this, went on July 1 to Switzerland for a month's holiday. Reaching Grindelwald on the 4th, he was joined on the 6th by Dr. Tyndall, and with him rambled on the glacier and made an expedition to the Faulhorn. On the 13th they went to the Rhone glacier, meeting Sir J. Lubbock on their way, at the other side of the Grimsel. Both here and at the Eggischhorn, where they went a few days later, Huxley confined himself to easy expeditions, or, as his notebook has it, stayed "quiet" or "idle," while the hale pair ascended the Galenstock and the Jungfrau.
By July 28 he was home again in time for an examiners' meeting at the
London University the next day, and a viva voce in physiology on the 4th
August, before going to Scotland to serve on the Fishery Commission.
This was the first of the numerous commissions on which he served. With his colleagues, Dr. Lyon Playfair (afterwards Lord Playfair) and Colonel Maxwell, he was busy from August 8 to September 16, chiefly on the west coast, taking evidence from the trawlers and their opponents, and making direct investigations into the habits of the herring.
The following letter to Mr. (afterwards Sir W.H.) Flower, then Curator of the Royal College of Surgeons' Museum, refers to this trip and to his appointment to the examinership in physiology at the College of Surgeons, for which he had applied in May and which he held until 1870. Mr. Flower, indeed, was deeply interested at this time in the same problems as Huxley, and helped his investigations for "Man's Place" by making a number of dissections to test the disputed relations between the brain of man and of the apes.]
Hotel de la Jungfrau, Aeggischhorn, July 18, 1862.
My dear Flower,
Many thanks for your letter. I shall make my acknowledgments to the council in due form when I have read the official announcement on my return to England. I trust they will not have occasion to repent declining Dr. —'s offer. At any rate I shall do my best.
I am particularly obliged to you for telling me about the Dijon bones. Dijon lies quite in my way in returning to England, and I shall stop a day there for the purpose of making the acquaintance of M. Nodet and his Schizopleuron. I have a sort of dim recollection that there are some other remains of extinct South American mammals in the Dijon Museum which I ought to see.