328 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



side that Mrs. Thomas Collier, nee Huxley, who had well earned 

 her several premiums from the fine-art institutions of London, 

 inherited her tendencies and capabilities in the direction of paint- 

 ing. Inspired in a measure, probably, through his love for art, 

 and with an inborn feeling for mechanical constructions. Prof. 

 Huxley always held a kindly sympathy for all that pertained 

 to the science of engineering; and he frequently expressed the 

 thought, which will doubtless seem strange to many, that he had 

 missed his vocation, and that the true field of his activities should 

 have been the field of an engineer. Yet it is singular that with 

 this proclivity for a branch of study which requires for its suc- 

 cessful accomplishment a generous supply of mathematical stimu- 

 lus, the fact that he was in no way a mathematician did not ter- 

 rify Huxley. He frequently admitted that he had neither a liking 

 nor an aptitude for figures, and it was a timely forethought in 

 lecturing, when a condition required a mathematical calculation 

 for its elucidation, to have the answer written in advance at one 

 corner of the board. This, as was naively explained by the lec- 

 turer, was to avoid the easy possibility of an error creeping into 

 an offhand calculation or problem in sums. 



In lecturing to his classes Huxley adhered strictly to business, 

 and it was rarely that a matter of levity was introduced to give 

 merriment to his listeners, I recall, in a course of some seventy 

 lectures, only a single instance of this kind, when, for some rea- 

 son (no longer in my memory), a reference was made to Chamis- 

 so's Peter Schlemiel a book which Prof. Huxley frankly admit- 

 ted gave him more genuine pleasure than any other in nonscien- 

 tific literature. Whether it was the refreshing frankness of this 

 admission, or the fact in itself that was quoted, which on this 

 occasion brought forth an unbounded merriment from his stu- 

 dents, was perhaps not fully decided for all of us, but there was 

 no questioning the spontaneousness of the applause which fol- 

 lowed the utterance. And this, as I now recall it, was the only 

 instance of applause greeting the lecturer in the middle of the 

 lecture during the entire course of my studentship. Huxley, like 

 Tyndal], was always careful to have his lectures fully prepared. 

 A few notes jotted down on a fly-sheet of paper or in small note- 

 books were the only guide for the full hour, which to most of the 

 students passed very rapidly. There was no display of eloquence, 

 no attempt to clothe description or explanation in floral verse, but 

 everything was stated in terse and succinct language, although 

 with due emphasis on important points, and this it was that made 

 it easy to follow. These class lectures were naturally very dif- 

 ferent from public addresses, in which Huxley always maintained 

 that wonderful dignity of expression and choice rhetoric which 

 have been the despair of his combatants, scientific no less than 



