Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 8

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following is in reply to a jest of Dr. Dohrn's--who was still a bachelor--upon a friend's unusual sort of offering to a young lady.]

I suspected the love affair you speak of, and thought the young damsel very attractive. I suppose it will come to nothing, even if he be disposed to add his hand to the iron and quinine, in the next present he offers...and, oh my Diogenes, happy in a tub of arthropodous Entwickelungsgeschichte [History of Development.], despise not beefsteaks, nor wives either. They also are good.

Jermyn Street, June 5, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

I have written to the Governor of Ceylon, and enclosed the first half of your letter to me to him as he understands High Dutch. I have told him that the best thing he can do is to write to you at Naples and tell you he will be very happy to see you as soon as you can come. And that if you do come you will give him the best possible advice about his museum, and let him have no rest until he has given you a site for a zoological station.

I have no doubt you will get a letter from him in three weeks or so.

His name is Gregory, and you will find him a good-humoured acute man of the world, with a very great general interest in scientific and artistic matters. Indeed in art I believe he is a considerable connoisseur.

I am very grieved to hear of your father's serious illness. At his age cerebral attacks are serious, and when we spent so many pleasant hours together at Naples, he seemed to have an endless store of vigour--very much like his son Anton.

What put it into your head that I had any doubt of your power of work?

I am ready to believe that you are Hydra in the matter of heads and Briareus in the matter of hands.

...If you go to Ceylon I shall expect you to come back by way of England. It's the shortest route anywhere from India, though it may not look so on the map.

How am I? Oh, getting along and just keeping the devil of dyspepsia at arm's length. The wife and other members of the H.F. are well, and would send you greetings if they knew I was writing to you.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A little later Von Willemoes Suhm] ("why the deuce does he have such a long name, instead of a handy monosyllable are dissyllable like Dohrn or Huxley?") [was recommended for the post. He afterwards was one of the scientific staff of the "Challenger," and died during the voyage.]

Morthoe, near Barnstaple, North Devon, August 5, 1872.

My dear Dohrn,

I trust you have not been very wroth with me for my long delay in answering your last letter. For the last six weeks I have been very busy lecturing daily to a batch of schoolmasters, and looking after their practical instruction in the laboratory which the Government has, at last, given me. In the "intervals of business" I have been taking my share in a battle which has been raging between my friend Hooker of Kew and his official chief...and moreover I have just had strength enough to get my daily work done and no more, and everything that could be put off has gone to the wall. Three days ago, the "Happy Family," bag and baggage, came to this remote corner, where I propose to take a couple of months' entire rest--and put myself in order for next winter's campaign. It is a little village five miles from the nearest town (which is Ilfracombe), and our house is at the head of a ravine running down to the sea. Our backs are turned to England and our faces to America with no land that I know of between. The country about is beautiful, and if you will come we will put you up at the little inn, and show you something better than even Swanage. There are slight difficulties about the commissariat, but that is the Hausfrau's business, and not mine. At the worst, bread, eggs, milk, and rabbits are certain, and the post from London takes two days!

Morthoe, Ilfracombe, North Devon, August 23, 1872.

My dear Whirlwind,

I promise you all my books, past, present, and to come for the Aquarium. The best part about them is that they will not take up much room. Ask for Owen's by all means; "Fas est etiam ab hoste doceri." I am very glad you have got the British a.s.sociation publications, as it will be a good precedent for the Royal Society.

Have you talked to Hooker about marine botany? He may be able to help you as soon as X. the accursed (may jacka.s.ses sit upon his grandmother's grave, as we say in the East) leaves him alone.

It is hateful that you should be in England without seeing us, and for the first time I lament coming here. The children howled in chorus when they heard that you could not come. At this moment the whole tribe and their mother have gone to the sea, and I must answer your letter before the post goes out, which it does here about half an hour after it comes in.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[In 1872 Huxley was at length enabled to establish in his regular cla.s.ses a system of science teaching based upon laboratory work by the students, which he had long felt to be the only true method. It involved the verification of every fact by each student, and was a training in scientific method even more than in scientific fact. Had circ.u.mstances only permitted, the new epoch in biological teaching might have been antedated by many years. But, as he says in the preface to the "Practical Biology," 1875:--]

Practical work was forbidden by the limitations of s.p.a.ce in the building in Jermyn Street, which possessed no room applicable to the purpose of a laboratory, and I was obliged to content myself, for many years, with what seemed the next best thing, namely, as full an exposition as I could give of the characters of certain plants and animals, selected as types of vegetable and animal organisation, by way of introduction to systematic zoology and paleontology.

[There was no laboratory work, but he would show an experiment or a dissection during the lecture or perhaps for a few minutes after, when the audience crowded round the lecture table.

The opportunity came in 1871. As he afterwards impressed upon the great city companies in regard to technical education, the teaching of science throughout the country turned upon the supply of trained teachers. The part to be played by elementary science under the Education Act of 1870, added urgency to the question of proper teaching. With this in view, he organised a course of instruction for those who had been preparing pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department, "scientific missionaries," as he described them to Dr. Dohrn.

In the promotion of the practical teaching of biology (writes the late Jeffery Parker, "Natural Science" 8 49), Huxley's services can hardly be overestimated. Botanists had always been in the habit of distributing flowers to their students, which they could dissect or not as they chose; animal histology was taught in many colleges under the name of practical physiology; and at Oxford an excellent system of zoological work had been established by the late Professor Rolleston.

("Rolleston (Professor Lankester writes to me) was the first to systematically conduct the study of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in this country by making use of a carefully selected series of animals.

His 'types' were the Rat, the Common Pigeon, the Frog, the Perch, the Crayfish, Blackbeetle, Anodon, Snail, Earthworm, Leech, Tapeworm. He had a series of dissections of these mounted, also loose dissections and elaborate ma.n.u.script descriptions. The student went through this series, dissecting fresh specimens for himself. After some ten years'

experience Rolleston printed his ma.n.u.script directions and notes as a book, called 'Forms of Animal Life.'

"This all preceded the practical cla.s.s at South Kensington in 1871. I have no doubt that Rolleston was influenced in his plan by your father's advice. But Rolleston had the earlier opportunity of putting the method into practice.

"Your father's series of types were chosen so as to include plants, and he gave more attention to microscopic forms and to microscopic structure than did Rolleston."

It was distinctive of the lectures that they were on biology, on plants as well as animals, to ill.u.s.trate all the fundamental features of living things.)

But the biological laboratory, as it is now understood, may be said to date from about 1870, when Huxley, with the cooperation of Professors Foster, Rutherford, Lankester, Martin, and others (T.J. Parker, G.B.

Howes, and the present Sir W. Thiselton Dyer, K.C.M.G., C.I.E.,), held short summer cla.s.ses for science teachers at South Kensington, the daily work consisting of an hour's lecture followed by four hours'

laboratory work, in which the students verified for themselves facts which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One clergyman, who had for years conducted cla.s.ses in physiology under the Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture in Huxley's 'Physiology.'"

Later, in 1872, when the biological department of the Royal School of Mines was transferred to South Kensington, this method was adopted as part of the regular curriculum of the school, and from that time the teaching "of zoology by lectures alone became an anachronism."

The first of these courses to schoolmasters took place, as has been said, in 1871. Some large rooms on the ground floor of the South Kensington Museum were used for the purpose. There was no proper laboratory, but professor and demonstrators rigged up everything as wanted. Huxley was in the full tide of that more than natural energy which preceded his breakdown in health, and gave what Professor Ray Lankester describes as "a wonderful course of lectures," one every day from ten to eleven for six weeks, in June and half July. The three demonstrators (those named first on the list above) each took a third of the cla.s.s, about thirty-five apiece. "Great enthusiasm prevailed.

We went over a number of plants and of animals--including microscopic work and some physiological experiment. The 'types' were more numerous than in later courses."

In 1872 the new laboratory--the present one--was ready.] "I have a laboratory," [writes Huxley to Dohrn,] "which it shall do your eyes good to behold when you come back from Ceylon, the short way." [(i.e.

via England.) here a similar course, under the same demonstrators, a.s.sisted by H.N. Martin, was given in the summer, Huxley, though very shaky in health, making a point of carrying them out himself.]

26 Abbey Place, June 4, 1872.

My dear Tyndall,

I MUST be at work on examination papers all day to-day, but to-morrow I am good to lunch with you (and abscond from the Royal Commission, which will get on very well without me) or to go with you and call on your friends, whichever may be most convenient.

Many thanks for all your kind and good advice about the lectures, but I really think they will not be too much for me, and it is of the utmost importance I should carry them on.

They are the commencement of a new system of teaching which, if I mistake not, will grow into a big thing and bear great fruit, and just at this present moment (n.o.body is necessary very long) I am the necessary man to carry it on. I could not get a suppleant if I would, and you are no more the man than I am to let a pet scheme fall through for the fear of a little risk of self. And really and truly I find that by taking care I pull along very well. Moreover, it isn't my brains that get wrong, but only my confounded stomach.

I have read your memorial [In the affair of Dr. Hooker already referred to.] which is very strong and striking, but a difficulty occurs to me about a good deal of it, and that is that it won't do to quote Hooker's official letters before they have been called for in Parliament, or otherwise made public. We should find ourselves in the wrong officially, I am afraid, by doing so. However we can discuss this when we meet. I will be at the Athenaeum at 4 o'clock.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.