A STUDENT'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HUXLEY. 331 



columns of the daily press, iu each of which the " iindernurse of 

 Darwinism " came in for an uncommonly large share of ridicule. 

 Finding that none of these papers brought forth any comment 

 from Prof. Huxley, their author in a personal letter called his at- 

 tention to them, at the same time asking to be advised as to what 

 particular course of reading would most readily enable him to 

 grapple with the various scientific questions which at that time 

 agitated the world. Prof. Huxley's full and laconic answer was, 

 " Take a cockroach and dissect it." No further inquiry came 

 from that source. 



I once found Prof. Huxley much depressed over a small para- 

 graph which also touched, and in a very depreciatory manner, 

 the evolutionary hypothesis, which had been contributed to the 

 daily press by his friend Carlyle. He greatly deplored the reck- 

 lessness of the utterances contained in the squib, and especially 

 painful to him was a markedly undignified reference to the one 

 man for whom Huxley had a greater reverence than for any 

 other Charles Darwin. To my interrogatory as to whether he 

 considered it necessary to reply to the paragraph, he promptly 

 and emphatically answered, " No ! " 



Remorseless as Huxley occasionally was in the cold exposition 

 of the blunders of his colaborers in science, he was usually very 

 lenient to those who pointed out his own mistakes. I remember 

 one occasion when a post-graduate student of the Royal School of 

 Mines, Patrick (now Professor) Geddes, intimated to the professor 

 that his interpretation of the mechanism of the radula in the 

 common garden snail, as was set forth in the Anatomy of Inverte- 

 brated Animals, was not supported by the newer laboratory dis- 

 sections. Prof. Huxley's response was a request of Mr. Geddes to 

 try a new dissection ; it was done, and it was found that the pupil 

 was right and the master wrong. Only once do I recall when a 

 correction was received with a regret almost akin to displeasure 

 the case of the Bathybius, the all-pervading protoplasm of the 

 oceanic deep. When Sir Wyville Thomson separated this sub- 

 stance as a mineral precipitate, it smashed a thought that had 

 already become pregnant with English and German naturalists, 

 and which threatened to become of genuine usefulness in explain- 

 ing the origin and development of the organic life forms of the 

 earth. 



Among his many eminent scientific contemporaries there were 

 few for whom Huxley had greater admiration than the German* 

 morphologist, Gegenbaur, and Karl Vogt ; the latter he regarded 

 as a tower of strength and in a certain sense a genius. When, 

 nearly two years after leaving London, I returned to my alma 

 mater and informed my past master that I had in the mean- 

 time been enrolled as a student, although in the class of paleon- 



