The writers to select their own subjects. Now the question is, Will seven or eight of us, representing different sciences, join together and undertake to supply at least one article in three months? Once a fortnight would want a minimum of six articles in three months, so that if there were six, each man must supply one.
Sylvester is talked of for Mathematics. I am going to write to Tyndall about doing Physics. Maskelyne and perhaps Frankland will take Chemistry and Mineralogy. You and I might do Biology; Ramsay, Geology; Smyth, Technology.
This looks to me like a very feasible plan, not asking too much of anyone, and yet giving all an opportunity of saying what he has to say.
Besides this the "Saturday" would be glad to get Reviews from us.
If all those mentioned agree to join, we will meet somewhere and discuss plans.
Let me have a line to say what you think, and believe me, ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[In 1858 he read three papers at the Geological and two at the Linnean; he lectured (February 15) on Fish and Fisheries at South Kensington, and on May 21 gave a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on "The Phenomena of Gemmation." He wrote an article for "Todd's Cyclopaedia," on the "Tegumentary Organs," an elaborate paper, as Sir M. Foster says, on a histological theme, to which, as to others of the same class on the Teeth and the Corpuscular Tactus ("Q. J. Micr. Science" 1853-4), he had been "led probably by the desire, which only gradually and through lack of fulfilment left him, to become a physiologist rather than a naturalist."
No less important was his more general work for science. Physiological study in England at this time was dominated by transcendental notions. To put first principles on a sound experimental basis was the aim of the new leaders of scientific thought. To this end Huxley made two contributions in 1858—one on the general subject of the cell theory, the other on the particular question of the development of the skull. "In a striking 'Review of the Cell Theory,'" says Sir M. Foster, "which appeared in the "British and Foreign Medical Review" in 1858, a paper which more than one young physiologist at the time read with delight, and which even to-day may be studied with no little profit, he, in this subject as in others, drove the sword of rational inquiry through the heart of conceptions, metaphysical and transcendental, but dominant."
Of this article Professor E. Ray Lankester also writes:—