CHAPTER XI

"There are certainly more than 100,000 species of insects, and yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen one, will be able to have a fair conception of the structure of the whole. I do not mean to say he will know that structure thoroughly, or as well as is desirable that he should know it; but he will have enough real knowledge to enable him to understand what he reads, to have genuine images in his mind of these structures which become so variously modified in all the forms of insects he has not seen. In fact, there are such things as types of form among animals and vegetables, and for the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what constitutes the leading modifications of animal and plant life, it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small number of animals and plants."

The type system in itself was not absolutely new. Rolleston, the Linacre professor at Oxford, in hisFormsof Animal Lifehad devised the method of teaching comparative anatomy by the study of a graded series of animals. But his method depended on the existence of a series of dissections and preparations made by a skilled craftsman; the tradition of teaching by authority instead of by investigation was maintained, although the authority of books and lectures was aided by museum specimens in glass bottles, the actual basis of the book being a series of dissections prepared by Mr. Charles Robertson, Rolleston's laboratory assistant, for the great International Exhibition of 1861. The authorities of Huxley's students were to be found in nature itself. The green scum from the nearest gutter, a handful of weed from a pond, a bean-plant, some fresh-water mud, a frog, and a pigeon were the ultimate authorities of his course. His students were taught how to observe them, and how to draw and record their observations. However familiar the objects, each student had to verify every fact afresh for himself. The business of the teacher was explanation of the methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of verification. It was a training in the immemorial attitude of the scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an integral part in national education.

As a matter of fact it was comparatively late in his life as a teacher that Huxley had complete opportunity for putting into practice his scheme for the laboratory teaching of biology. In 1854 there was no laboratory attached to the Natural History Department of the School of Mines. Lectures alone were given, and the only opportunity the student had of any practical acquaintance with the facts was in a short interview with the professor at the lecture table afterthe lecture. This condition continued practically to 1872. But a few years before that Huxley and his colleagues got up a kind of pronunciamento deploring the existing state of affairs. In his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1870 Huxley said: "There is a complete want in the School of Mines, as it now exists, of any means of teaching several of the subjects practically. For example, I am set there to teach natural history without a biological laboratory and without the means of shewing a single dissection." Against strong internal opposition and at considerable pecuniary loss Huxley and some of his colleagues succeeded, in 1872, in getting the School of Mines transferred to South Kensington, where it became the Royal College of Science. For the first course of instruction given in the new buildings, Huxley obtained the aid of Prof. M. Foster, Prof. Rutherford, and Prof. Ray Lankester. The laboratory course originated by Huxley and shaped by him with these three distinguished assistants became the model of the regular courses given subsequently, and, with various slight modifications, has since been adopted almost universally. Later on, Huxley described it as follows:

"I lecture to a class of students daily for about four months and a half, and my class have, of course, their text-books; but the essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I regard as really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instruments, and we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amœba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-waterpolyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite conception, by means of sense images, of the characteristic structure of each of the leading modifications of the animal kingdom; and that is perfectly possible by going no further than the length of that list of forms which I have enumerated. If a man knows the structure of the animals I have mentioned, he has a clear and exact, however limited apprehension of the essential features of the organization of all those great divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned severally belong. And it then becomes possible to him to read with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a structure, he has a definite image in his mind of what the name means in the particular creature he is reading about, and therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere repetition of words; but every term employed in the description, we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a modification of that which he has seen."

Huxley himself was originally a medical man; all through his life he was chiefly interested in the biological sciences which underlie a scientific practice of medicine, and as teacher and examiner he had much to do with the shaping of medical education in London. Acting in various public capacities, as a member of commissions dealing with medical education, or as a witness before them, in magazine articles and in public speeches he made many contributions to the problems to be faced in medical education. Some of these related to the conditions peculiar to medical training in London. In the greatest city of the world there wasduring Huxley's life and there is still nothing comparable with the great universities of Europe and America, of Scotland and Ireland. Some dozen hospitals, supported partly by endowments, partly by charities, attempt each to maintain a complete, independent medical school. As the requirements of medical education in staff, laboratories, and general equipment has advanced, these hospitals have made heroic efforts to advance with them. Notwithstanding the zeal and public spirit of the staff and managers of the hospitals, this want of system has naturally resulted in a multiplication of inefficient institutions and a number of makeshift arrangements. Huxley repeatedly urged the concentration of all this diffuse effort into a few centres, but this inevitable reform has not yet become possible.

A second important consideration, and one that has a much wider application, relates to the kind of person by whom the scientific sides of medical teaching should be given. Primitively, all the instruction to medical students was given by those actually engaged in the practice of medicine. Huxley was strongly of the opinion that the teachers of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and so forth, should be specialists devoted to these subjects for life, and not merely surgeons and physicians who engaged in teaching until their practice grew sufficiently to monopolise their attention.

"I get every year," he said, "the elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner—volumes of I suppose 400 pages altogether—and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology—only abstracts of them. How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world—in a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour—if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice?"

There would always be found men, he declared, who would make the choice between the wealth which may come by successful practice and a modest competency, when that modest competency was to be combined with a scientific career and the means of advancing knowledge. It was to those who made the latter choice that he would entrust the teaching of the sciences underlying medicine; partly because from the mere mechanical reason of time these men would be better able to keep pace with the most recent advances in knowledge, and partly because their teaching would be stimulated by their own work in advancing knowledge. In this great matter the world is rapidly advancing towards the standard of Huxley; as each new appointment is made it becomes more and more probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and investigator rather than a practitioner.

In another general question of the politics of medical education Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency of change is toward his view. One of the first results of the awakening of medical education in the middle of this century was a tendency to throw an almost intolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical student. In the revolt from the old apprenticeship system, in which the student, from the very first, gave his chief attention to practice, and was left almost to himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the principles and theories underlying his profession, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and there was almost no branch of the biological and physical sciences in which he was not expected to go through a severe training. On the old system the greater part of his time was spent in the wards of the hospital; on the new system it was only at an advanced stage of hiscareer that he entered the wards at all, a great part of his time and energy being spent in the purely scientific teaching of the medical college. Huxley, although he had largely aided in the overthrow of the happy-go-lucky older system, of which Mr. Bob Sawyer was no exaggerated type, was equally severe on the reckless extensions of the new system. "If I were a despot," he said, "I would cut down the theoretical branches to a very considerable extent." He would discard comparative anatomy and botany, materia medica, and chemistry and physics, except as applied to physiology, from the medical student's course. At first sight, this seems a hard saying, but it is to be remembered that at that time the normal curriculum of a medical student lasted only four years, a space of time barely sufficient for the necessary minimum of purely medical and surgical work. Huxley's view was that chemistry and physics, botany and zoölogy, should be part of the general education, not of the special medical education; he wished students to spend one or two years after their ordinary career at school in work on these elementary scientific subjects, and then to begin their medical course free from the burden of extra-professional subjects. With certain limits due to the different local conditions in different teaching centres Huxley's system is being adopted. In most cases the authorities in medical education are unable to leave the whole responsibility of the elementary education in science to the schools from which medical students come, as the conditions under which scientific subjects are still taught in schools leave much to be desired. The average length of the medical curriculum has been extended and the elementary scientific subjects are taken first, sometimes at the medicalcolleges, sometimes in the scientific departments of universities. The interesting general point of view is that Huxley, although himself a biologist and teacher of biology, took too broad an outlook on the general policy of education to insist upon his own subject to the detriment of the precise practical objects of the training of medical students.

In the days of Huxley's greatest activity, while by the natural force of events and by his special efforts science was becoming more and more recognised as a necessary and important branch of general education, the cry was raised against it that scientific education was not capable of giving what is called culture. A scientific man was regarded as a mere scientific specialist, and science was considered to have no place in, and in fact to be an enemy of, "liberal education." In 1880, at Birmingham, Huxley attacked this view in a speech delivered at the opening of the Mason College. Sir Josiah Mason, the benevolent founder of that great institution, had made it one of the conditions of the foundation that the College should make no provision for "mere literary instruction and education." This gave Huxley a text for raising the whole question of the relation of science to culture. He declared that he held very strongly by two convictions.

"The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time on either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education."

He quoted from Matthew Arnold, then in the zenith of his fame as a chief apostle of culture, and shewedthat there were two propositions involved in the "literary" view of culture. The first was that a "criticism of life" was the essence of culture; the second, that literature contained the materials which sufficed for the construction of such a criticism. With the first proposition he had no dispute, taking the view that culture was something quite different from learning or technical skill. "It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and its limitations." Against the second proposition he urged in the first place that it was self-evident that after having learned all that Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern literature has to tell us, it was still necessary to have a deeper foundation for criticism of life. An acquaintance with what physical science had done, particularly in later years, was as necessary to criticism of life as any of the literary materials. Next, following the biological habit of examining anything by studying its development, he shewed how the connection between "culture" and study of classical literature had come into existence. For many centuries Latin grammar, with logic and rhetoric, studied through Latin, were the fundamentals of education. A liberal education was possible only through study of the language in which all or nearly all the materials for it were written. With the changes produced by the Renascence there came a battle between Latin and Greek, and Greek came to be part of a liberal education. Later on, there came a similar battle between the classical and modern languages, and now themodern languages have included and absorbed all the necessary material for knowledge and criticism. Those who cling to classics as the basis of culture and education are clinging to old weapons long after these have ceased to be effective, simply because at one time in history only these weapons were available in the struggle for knowledge.

[Contents]

Establishment of Compulsory Education in England—The Religious Controversy—Huxley Advocates the Bible without Theology—His Compromise on the "Cowper-Temple" Clause—Influence of the New Criticism—Science and Art Instruction—Training of Teachers—University Education—The Baltimore Address—Technical Education—So-called "Applied Science"—National Systems of Education as "Capacity-Catchers."

In the last chapter, the special relation of Huxley to scientific education was described, and, naturally enough, it is in special connection with scientific education that his influence is best known. But he was keenly interested in all the larger problems of general, university, and technical education, and he played a great part in shaping the lines upon which these problems have been solved in England.

In the years immediately before 1870, all England was wrestling with the great problem of elementary education, in the arrangements for which it was far behind not only the leading European countries but even its sister-kingdom, Scotland. In 1870 there came into operation an Act of Parliament for the regulation of elementary education under the supervision of locally elected school boards. Hitherto elementaryeducation had been controlled by the Established Church, and by other denominational religious bodies, and the quality and quantity of the instruction provided, for financial and various other reasons, had been extremely unsatisfactory. But a long and furious battle had raged around the religious question; elementary education was now to be national, compulsory, and universal; where religious bodies maintained schools that complied with certain fixed standards of efficiency, attendance of children at these was to be regarded as satisfactory, and in addition to the ordinary subjects, such theological and religious teaching as the supporting bodies chose might be added. But in the schools for all and sundry, under the control of boards representing the whole population, and deriving that part of their income represented by the subscriptions of the religious bodies in the denominational schools from public rates, levied on the whole population, was any definite creed to be inculcated? The extreme Church party, perhaps naturally, held that the creed established by law in the land should be taught in these new schools; extreme supporters of other creeds, and a majority of ordinary people of all creeds or of no creeds, objected to a new establishment of a sectarian doctrine, even though that sectarian doctrine were the doctrine of the national religion. The final result of the dispute as codified in the Act of Parliament was what was known as the Cowper-Temple Clause: "No religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular denomination shall be taught in the school." The actual value of any clause, however it may appear to be a fair compromise, depends on the spirit in which it is practically interpreted, and no sooner had the Act been passedthan the battle was renewed again over the interpretation of the clause. Many of the Church controversialists held that the liberal or more advanced party intended to exclude all reference to the Bible or to religion, on the plea that some sect could be found to which the most attenuated expression of religion would appear to be against the plain meaning of the clause, and Huxley, who had been in the forefront of the controversy, and who was a candidate for the first London School Board, was decried as an enemy of the Bible and of all religion and morality because he had expressed what he called a secular interpretation of the clause. In an article published in theContemporary Reviewimmediately after the election, Huxley explained precisely what he took the clause to mean, and, afterwards, at all events during the existence of the Board to which he was elected, succeeded in carrying out his intentions in the main.

His first general point was to deprecate the action of those extremists of both sides who tried to make the education of children a mere battle-ground of religious dogmas. He then laid down what he conceived to be the lines of most general utility upon which, under the provisions of the Act, the education of children should be conducted. In the foreground he placed physical training and drill, as of supreme importance to young children, especially in the case of the poor children of large towns.

"All the conditions of the lives of such are unfavourable to their physical well-being. They are badly lodged, badly housed, badly fed, and live from one year's end to another in bad air, without a chance of a change. They have no play-grounds; they amuse themselves with marbles and chuck-farthing, instead of cricket and hare-and-hounds; and if it werenot for the wonderful instinct which leads all poor children of tender years to throw themselves under the feet of cab-horses whenever they can, I know not how they would learn to use their limbs with agility."

This, humanitarianism as it was, was not the mere emotional sentiment of the typical humanitarian; he went on to give the soundest practical reasons for physical development.

"Whatever doubts people may entertain about the efficacy of natural selection, there can be none about artificial selection; and the breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine stock of pigs, or sheep, under the conditions to which the children of the poor are exposed, would be the laughing stock even of the bucolic mind. Parliament has already done something in this direction by declining to be an accomplice in the asphyxiation of school children. It refuses to make any grant to a school in which the cubical contents of the school-room are inadequate to allow of proper respiration."

He wished to see physical training put on the same system.

The second great point upon which he laid stress was the necessity of providing training in domestic economy, cookery, and other household accomplishments, for poor girls. These demands of Huxley seem simple and obvious, now that by his efforts and the efforts of others they have been accomplished, but in England, even thirty years ago, it required more than an ordinary prevision and boldness to insist upon them.

Huxley passed next to the burning question of the time. He treated it in the broadest and least sectarian spirit.

"The boys and girls for whose education the School Boards have to provide, have not merely to discharge domestic duties,but each of them is a member of a social and political organisation of great complexity, and has, in future life, to fit himself into that organisation, or be crushed by it. To this end it is surely needful, not only that they should be made acquainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but that their affections should be trained, so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which tends to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite course of action which is fraught with evil."

He then proceeded to point out the distinction between the affection which is called religion, and the science which is called theology, and, without entering into the question as to whether the latter were or were not a true science, he insisted on the danger of a confusion between the two.

"We are divided into two parties—the advocates of so-called 'religious' teaching on the one hand, and those of so-called 'secular' teaching on the other. And both parties seem to me to be not only hopelessly wrong, but in such a position that if either succeeded completely, it would discover, before many years were over, that it had made a great mistake and done serious evil to the cause of education. For, leaving aside the more far-seeing minority on either side, what the religious party is crying for is mere theology, under the name of religion; while the secularists have unwisely and wrongfully admitted the assumption of their opponents, and demand the abolition of all religious teaching, when they only want to be free of theology—burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches." ... "If I were compelled to choose for one of my own children, between a school in which real religious instruction is given, and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the sake of the particles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may be weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless in the case of a fewexceptionally tender stomachs. Hence, when the great mass of the English people declare that they want to have the children in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and when it is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and out of Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of the Vice-President of the Council that it was intended that such Bible-teaching should be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it could be shewn, I do not see what reason there is for opposing that wish."

He went on to explain that, although he had always been strongly in favour of secular education, by that term he meant only education without theology, and he praised the English Bible in language as noble as has ever been applied to it by the most ardent of theologians.

"The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if left to himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary spacein the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings and the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work."

Lastly, he laid down the lines of the general education to be given. He pointed out that already in the existing schools a very considerable burden of work was imposed on the children in the form of catechism, lists of the kings of Israel, geography of Palestine, and that when these fantastic modes of education had been eliminated there was plenty of time and energy to be employed. The instruction in physical training was more than half play; that in the domestic subjects had an engrossing interest of its own. He proposed, first, the necessary discipline in the means for acquiring knowledge, the tools for employing it, that is to say, reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, he believed that a certain amount of knowledge, of intellectual discipline, and of artistic training should be conveyed in the elementary schools, and for these purposes he proposed to teach some rudiments of physical science, drawing, and singing.

In most respects the progress of primary education in England has been a continuous progress along these lines suggested by Huxley, and he may be regarded as in this fashion one of the great shapers of the destinies of his race, for nothing can have a bearing more important on the character and fate of a race than the manner of training provided for the masses of individuals composing it. It is only in the matter of the religious instruction that the course of events has been widely different from the neutral exposition of the Bible as suggested by him. In 1870 a great majority of the people of England who reflected upon thematter at all, and all those who accepted current ideas without reflection, accepted the Bible as an inspired, direct, and simple authority on all great matters of faith and morality. Therefore, when Huxley, as by far the most important man among those who advocated a secular education, was an advocate and not in the least an opponent of Bible teaching, they were well content to let the matter rest. There were, it is true, a certain number of zealots who entered the boards with the avowed purpose, on the one hand, of getting as much dogmatic teaching and interpretation added as it might be possible to smuggle in, and, on the other, to reduce the simplest Bible teaching to a minimum. But the vast majority of persons were out of sympathy with these fanaticisms. Since 1870, however, a gradual change has occurred in the attitude of the majority to the Bible in England. The growth of the new criticism and of knowledge of it has produced the result that now only a small minority of reflecting people in England accept the Bible in the old simple way; the majority thinks that it requires interpretation and explanation by the authority of the Church. And so a new battle over dogma has begun; moderate Church people no longer accept the compromise of Huxley, but strive for an interpretation which must be dogmatic, and there is a new dispute as to what may be regarded as undenominational religion. When a majority of reasonable persons accepted Huxley's suggestions of simple Bible teaching they did so not because they believed, as he did, that the Bible was simply great literature, great tradition, and great morality, but because they believed it to be direct, inspired authority. It is a curious coincidence that Huxley himself did so much to spread knowledge of the new criticism,and that a first result of this diffusion was to overthrow the compromise arranged largely by his influence, and which for many years provided a middle way in which sensible persons avoided the extremes of theological and anti-theological zealots.

Early in the course of his career as a member of the London School Board, Huxley crystallised his views as to the general policy of education in a phrase which perhaps has done more than any other phrase ever invented to bring home to men's minds the ideal of a national system of education. "I conceive it to be our duty," he said, "to make a ladder from the gutter to the university along which any child may climb." We have seen the nature of his views as to the lowest rungs of this ladder; we may now turn to his work and views as to the higher stages. He expressed these views in occasional speeches and articles, and he had many important opportunities in aiding to carry them into actual practice. He was a member of a number of important Royal Commissions: Commission on the Royal College of Science for Ireland, 1866; Commission on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, 1868; Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science, 1870-75; Royal Commission to enquire into the Universities of Scotland, 1876-78; Royal Commission on the Medical Acts, 1881-82. From the beginning, he was closely associated with the Science and Art Department, the operations of which threw a web of education, intermediate between primary and university education, all over Britain. A number of the teachers under that department were trained by him, and as examiner to the department he took the greatest care to reduce to a minimum the evils necessarily attendant on the mode of payment byresults. A certain number of teachers made it their chief effort to secure the largest possible number of grants. Huxley regarded these as poachers of the worst kind, and did all he could to foil them. He did all he could to promote systematic practical instruction in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired to learn their business more thoroughly. He insisted again and again upon the popular nature of the classes; their great advantage was that they were accessible to all who chose to avail themselves of them after working hours, and that they brought the means of instruction to the doors of the factories and workshops. The subjects which he considered of most importance were foreign languages, drawing, and elementary sciences, and he wished them to be used first of all by those who were handicraftsmen and who therefore left the elementary schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

In a lecture given at the formal opening of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore in 1876, and in a Rectorial address to the University of Aberdeen two years earlier, Huxley laid down the general lines of university education as he conceived it. He began by supposing that a good primary education had already been received.

"Such an education should enable an average boy of fifteen or sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from the study of our classic writers; to have a general acquaintance with the history of his own country and with the great laws of social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary arithmetic and geometry. He should have obtained an acquaintance with logic rather by example than by precept;while the acquirement of the elements of music and drawing should have been a pleasure rather than work."

He had not much to say for secondary or intermediate education, partly because at that time, in England at least, the secondary schools were in a hopeless state of incapacity, and differed from primary schools not only in their greater expense, their adaptation to the class-spirit which demanded the separation of the boys of the upper and middle classes from those in the lower ranks of society, but chiefly in the futility of the education given at the majority of them. But where intermediate schools did exist, he demanded that they should keep on the same wide track of general knowledge, not sacrificing one branch of knowledge for another. He held that the elementary instruction to which he had referred embraced all the real kinds of knowledge and mental activity possible to man. The university could add no new fields of mental activity, no new departments of knowledge. What it could do was to intensify and specialise the instruction in each department.

"Thus literature and philology, represented in the elementary school by English alone, in the university will extend over the ancient and modern languages. History, which like charity, best begins at home, but, like charity, should not end there, will ramify into anthropology, archæology, political history, and geography, with the history of the growth of the human mind and of its products, in the shape of philosophy, science, and art, and the university will present to the student libraries, museums of antiquities, collections of coins, and the like, which will efficiently subserve these studies. Instruction in the elements of political economy, a most essential but hitherto sadly neglected part of elementary education, will develop in the university into political economy, sociology, and law. Physical science will have its great divisions, ofphysical geography, with geology and astronomy; physics; chemistry and biology; represented not merely by professors and their lectures, but by laboratories in which the students, under guidance of demonstrators, will work out facts for themselves and come into that direct contact with reality which constitutes the fundamental distinction of scientific education. Mathematics will soar into its highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy may be scaled by those whose aptitude for abstract thought has been awakened by elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial and plastic art, of architecture, and of music will offer a thorough discipline in the principles and practice of art to those in whom lies nascent the rare faculty of æsthetic representation, or the still rarer powers of creative genius."

Early in the seventies the problems connected with what is called technical education became prominent in the minds of the most far-seeing of this nation. It became plain that England was not advancing with the same strides as some other nations in arts and manufactures, and the most obvious difference between England and the rivals whose advance was causing anxiety lay in her deficiency in education. Science or knowledge of nature lies at the root of all the arts and manufactures, and it was our relation to scientific teaching and research that required investigation. Naturally enough, Huxley took the keenest interest in this question and made large contributions to its solution, contributions which have not yet been put completely into operation. He insisted most strongly upon a point that we as a nation have not yet completely grasped. There is no difference between applied science and any other kind of science. The chemistry of manufactures, the physics of industrial machinery, the biology of agriculture and of fisheries, are not different from other chemistries and physics andbiologies. They are merely special cases of the application of the same general fund of knowledge, and the same general principles of investigation. Huxley wished that the term "applied science" had never been invented, or that it could be destroyed. A man cannot study the chemistry of dyeing or make advances in it unless he be a thoroughly trained chemist in the full sense of the word. More than that, many of the greatest discoveries, using the word "great" as applied to commercial advantage rather than to abstract progress in knowledge, have been made by those who were pursuing research for its own sake rather than for any immediate commercial advantage to be derived from it. Hence he regarded it of vital importance, from the mere point of view of the prosperity of the country, that there should be a sufficiently large number of scientific men provided with the means for research in the shape of income and appliances. The most immediately utilitarian fashion for the nation to encourage science, was to encourage science in its highest and most advanced aspects. This meant the endowment of research and the support of universities and other institutions in which research might be conducted, and Huxley strove unceasingly for the benefit of all such great organisations. One of the last public occasions of his life was his appearance as leader of a deputation to urge upon the government the formation of a real university in London which should unite the scattered institutions of that great city and promote the highest spheres of the pursuit of knowledge. He held the view, strongly, that a useful combination was to be made by uniting the functions of teaching and investigation. A teacher taught better when his mind was kept fresh by the advances he himself was making,and an investigator, by having a moderate amount of teaching to do, gained from the need of forcing his mind from time to time to take broad surveys of the whole field a part of which he was engaged in tilling. The first great object, then, in promoting science so as to reap the most direct national advantage from it, was to encourage science in its highest and widest forms. It cannot be said that England has yet learned this lesson. The number of institutions in Germany where advanced investigation is continuously pursued is absolutely and relatively greater than the number in England.

The second part of technical education is that to which general attention is more commonly given. It consists of the kind of training to be given to the great army of workers in the country. In regard to this, as in regard to research work, Huxley insisted on the absence of distinction between technical or applied science and science without such a limiting prefix. So far as technical instruction meant definite teaching of a handicraft, he believed that it could be learned satisfactorily only in the workshop itself.

"The workshop is the only real school for a handicraft. The education which precedes that of the workshop should be entirely devoted to the strengthening of the body, the elevation of the moral faculties, and the cultivation of the intelligence; and, especially, to the imbuing of the mind with a broad and clear view of the laws of that natural world with the components of which the handicraftsman will have to deal. And, the earlier the period of life at which the handicraftsman has to enter into the actual practice of his craft, the more important is it that he should devote the precious hours of preliminary education to things of the mind, which have no direct and immediate bearing on his branch of industry, though they lie at the foundation of all the realities."

He compared his own handicraft as an anatomist with the handicrafts of artisans, and declared that the kind of preliminary training he would choose for himself or for his pupils was precisely the training he would provide for them. He did not wish that one who proposed to be a biologist should learn dissection during his school-days; that would come later, and, in the meantime, broader and deeper foundations had to be laid. These were the ordinary subjects of a liberal education: physical training, drawing, and a little music, French and German, the ordinary English subjects, and the elements of physical science. Against such costly schemes of education for the whole population of a nation, many objections have been urged. Of these, perhaps the chief is that the majority of human beings even in the most civilised country are not capable of profiting by or taking an interest in, or certainly of advancing far in, most subjects. Huxley met such objections in a spirit of the widest statesmanship. There were two reasons for making the general education of all what he called a liberal education. The first was that, even in a liberal education such as he advocated, no subject was pursued beyond the broad elementary stages, and that during the early years of life, while the framework and the character were forming, it was of first-rate importance not to stunt either by lack of material. The second great principle was that until any individual had had the opportunity, it was impossible to say whether or no he would profit much or little, and the gain to the whole nation by not missing any of those who were born with unusual natural capacity was more than worth the cost of affording opportunities to all.

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