162 NATURAL SCIENCE. March, 



while the rest of his strictly original contributions to zoology are, for 

 a man of his intellectual calibre, hardly more than opuscula. 



But what opuscula ! There is not one of them but contains 

 some brilliant generalisation, some new and fruitful way of looking at 

 the facts of the science. The keenest morphological insight and 

 inductive power are everywhere apparent; but the imagination is 

 always kept well in hand, and there are none of those airy specula- 

 tions — a liberal pound of theory to a bare ounce of fact — by which so 

 many reputations have been made. As examples of scientific method, 

 his papers are always valuable, and none more so than the Croonian 

 Lecture on the theory of the vertebrate skull. I admit that 

 vertebrate morphology has advanced so much since 1858 that it 

 requires almost an antiquarian taste to go back so far, but the modest 

 little pamphlet is still capable of furnishing some excellent lessons 

 even to the youngest and most infallible of modern morphologists. 



Looking at the matter from rather a narrow and professional 

 standpoint, I am inclined to think that modern biology owes a larger 

 debt to Huxley the teacher than to Huxley the investigator. His 

 lectures were like his writings, luminously clear, without the faintest 

 disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with 

 no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that 

 quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry ; 

 lightened by occasional epigrams or flashes of caustic humour, but 

 with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a 

 lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative 

 anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to solve 

 a morphological problem was as fine a thing as to win a battle. He 

 was an admirable draughtsman, and his blackboard illustrations were 

 always a great feature of his lectures, especially when, to show the 

 relations of two animal types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and 

 smudges, evolve the one into the other before our eyes. He seemed 

 to have a real affection for certain of the specimens illustrating his 

 lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving manner; when 

 he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes throw his 

 arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him and take its hand, 

 as if its silent companionship were an inspiration. To me the 

 lectures before his small class at Jermyn Street or South Kensington, 

 with the skeletons and " pickles " on the table before him, were 

 almost more impressive than the discourses at the Royal Institution, 

 where for an hour and a half he poured forth a stream of dignified, 

 earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without the 

 assistance of a note. 



Occasionally, but very rarely, his iconoclastic tendencies peeped 

 out in his lectures. On one occasion he was describing the heart, and 

 came in due course to the mitral valve. " This valve," he said, " is 

 so called from a supposed resemblance to a bishop's mitre. You 

 know the thing I mean — a sort of cross between a fool's cap and a 





