Abstract
DURING the four years when the Challenger was sailing the oceans of the world, Sir Wyville Thomson left his natural history class-room in the University of Edinburgh to lead the expedition. The vacancy was filled temporarily by two naturalists of European fame—Julius Victor Carus, of Leipzig, who conducted the zoology courses in tlie summer sessions of 1873 and 1874, and Thomas Henry Huxley in 1875 and 1876. An account of their tenure of the natural history chair, by Prof. James Ritchie, appears in the summer number of the University of Edinburgh Journal (pp. 206–212), the information about Huxley being gathered mainly from the class roll-books, and from a small notebook of Huxley's dealing with “Lectures, Edinboro”, in the Huxley Library of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Huxley drew a crowded audience for his introductory lecture on “The Crocodile”—it was a free lecture—and he laments that many parsons were present who “came to curse and didn't remain to pay”. His course proper, covering twelve weeks, traversed the whole animal kingdom from Protozoa to Mammalia, and was predominantly morphological and classificatory, although generally some reference was made to development and to the fossil record of a group.
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Huxley's Teaching at Edinburgh. Nature 145, 965 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145965c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145965c0