t 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South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which,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 relationsh