Jan.
Society in 1883. Between 1870 and 1885, when impaired health compelled his retirement, he filled numerous government positions, including, from 1881 to 1885, that of Inspector of Salmon Fisheries.
To quote from Professor Haeckel's memorable notice of Professor Huxley's work, published in 1S74 (Nature, IX, Feb. 5, 1874, pp. 257, 258) : "Indeed if at the present we run over the names distinguished in the several sciences into which Natural Knowledge may be divided — in Physics, in Chemistry, in Botany, in Zoology — we find but few investigators who can be said to have mastered the whole range of any one of them. Among the few we must place Thomas Henry Huxley, the distinguished British investigator, who at the present time justly ranks as the first zoologist among his countrymen. When we say the first zoologist, we give the widest and fullest signification to the word 'zoology' which the latest developments of this science demand. Zoology is, in this sense, the entire biology of animals ; and we accordingly consider as essential parts of it the whole field of Animal Morphology and Physiology, including not only Comparative Anatomy and Embryology, but also Systematic Zoology, Paheontology and Zoological Philosophy. We look upon it as a special merit in Prof. Huxley that he has a thoroughly broad conception of the science in which he labors, and that, with a most careful and empirical acquaintance with individual phenomena, he combines a clear philosophical appreciation of general relations.
"When we consider the long series of distinguished memoirs with which, during the last quarter of a century, Prof. Huxley has enriched zoological literature, we find that in each of the larger divisions of the animal kingdom we are indebted to him for important discoveries. From the lowest animals, he has gradually extended his investigations up to the highest, and even to man. His earlier labors were, for the most part, occupied with the lower marine animals, especially with the pelagic organisms swimming at the surface of the open sea... But it is the comparative anatomy and classification of the Vertebrata which, during the last ten years, he has especially studied and advanced. . . . After Charles Darwin had, in 1859, reconstructed this most important biological theory, and by his epoch-making theory of Natural Selection placed it on an entirely new foundation, Huxley was the first who extended it to man, and in 1863, in his celebrated three Lectures on 'Man's Place in Nature,' admirably worked out its most important developments. With luminous clearness, and convincing certainty, he has here established the fundamental law, that, in every respect, the anatomical differences between man and the highest apes are of less value than those between the highest and the lowest apes."
Huxley's work on birds may be regarded as an incident in his general work on the morphology and classification of Vertebrates, although his contributions to ornithological literature place him in the front rank among investigators of the affinities and relationships of the various groups of birds to each other, and of birds as a class to other Vertebrates;
