…Indeed it is a fundamental study in morphology. The extreme interest and importance of the views put forward in that article may be judged of by the fact that although it is forty years since it was published, and although our knowledge of cell structure has made immense progress during those forty years, yet the main contention of that article, namely that cells are not the cause but the result of organisation—in fact, are, as he says, to the tide of life what the line of shells and weeds on the seashore is to the tide of the living sea—is even now being re-asserted, and in a slightly modified form is by very many cytologists admitted as having more truth in it than the opposed view and its later outcomes, to the effect that the cell is the unit of life in which and through which alone living matter manifests its activities.
The second was his Croonian Lecture of 1858, "On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," in which he demonstrated from the embryological researches of Rathke and others, that after the first step the whole course of development in the segments of the skull proceeded on different lines from that of the vertebral column; and that Oken's imaginative theory of the skull as modified vertebrae, logically complete down to a strict parallel between the subsidiary head-bones and the limbs attached to the spine, outran the facts of a definite structure common to all vertebrates which he had observed. ("Following up Rathke, he strove to substitute for the then dominant fantastic doctrines of the homologies of the cranial elements advocated by Owen, sounder views based on embryological evidence. He exposed the futility of attempting to regard the skull as a series of segments, in each of which might be recognised all the several parts of a vertebra, and pointed out the errors of trusting to superficial resemblances of shape and position. He showed, by the history of the development of each, that, though both skull and vertebral column are segmented, the one and the other, after an early stage, are fashioned on lines so different as to exclude all possibility of regarding the detailed features of each as mere modifications of a type repeated along the axis of the body. 'The spinal column and the skull start from the same primitive condition, whence they immediately begin to diverge.' 'It may be true to say that there is a primitive identity of structure between the spinal or vertebral column and the skull; but it is no more true that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column than it would be to affirm that the vertebral column is modified skull.' This lecture marked an epoch in England in vertebrate morphology, and the views enunciated in it carried forward, if somewhat modified, as they have been, not only by Huxley's subsequent researches and by those of his disciples, but especially by the splendid work of Gegenbauer, are still, in the main, the views of the anatomists of to-day."—Sir M. Foster, Royal Society Obituary Notice of T.H. Huxley.)
With the demolition of Oken's theory fell the superstructure raised by its chief supporter, Owen, "archetype" and all.
It was undoubtedly a bold step to challenge thus openly the man who was acknowledged as the autocrat of science in Britain. Moreover, though he had long felt that on his own subjects he was Owen's master, to begin a controversy was contrary to his deliberate practice. But now he had the choice of submitting to arbitrary dictation or securing himself from further aggressions by dealing a blow which would weaken the authority of the aggressor. For the growing antagonism between him and Owen had come to a head early in the preceding year, when the latter, taking advantage of the permission to use the lecture-theatre at Jermyn Street for the delivery of a paleontological course, unwarrantably assumed the title of Professor of Paleontology at the School of Mines, to the obvious detriment of Huxley's position there. His explanations not satisfying the council of the School of Mines, Huxley broke off all personal intercourse with him.
CHAPTER 1.11.
1857-1858.
Throughout this period his health was greatly tried by the strain of his work and life in town. Headache! headache! is his repeated note in the early part of 1857, and in 1858 we find such entries as:—]
"February 11.—Used up. Hypochondrical and bedevilled."
"Ditto 12."
"13.—Not good for much."