442 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. 



had anything to do with the success on which I congratulate 

 you, I am very glad. 



I used to say of my own lectures that if nobody else learned 

 anything from them, I did ; because I always took a great deal of 

 pains over them. But it is none the less satisfactory to find that 

 there were other learners. 



As for the ordinary course of a day's work, the more 

 fitful energy and useless mornings of the earliest period in 

 London were soon left behind. He was never one of those 

 portentously early risers who do a fair day's work before 

 other people are up; there was only one period, about 1873, 

 when he had to be specially careful of his health, and, 

 under Sir Andrew Clark's regime, took riding exercise for 

 an hour each day before starting for South Kensington, 

 that he records the fact of doing any work before breakfast, 

 and that was letter-writing. 



Much of the day during the session, and still more when 

 his lectures were over, would thus be spent in original re- 

 search, or in the examination and description of fossils in 

 his official duty as Paleontologist to the Survey. As often 

 as not, there would be a sitting of some Royal Commission 

 to attend ; committees of some learned society ; meetings 

 or dinners in the evening ; if not, there would be an article 

 to write or proofs to correct. Indeed, the greater part of 

 the work by which the world knows him best was done 

 after dinner, and after a long day's work in the lecture- 

 room and laboratory. 



He possessed a wonderful faculty for tearing out the 

 heart of a book, reading it through at a gallop, but knowing 

 what it said on all the points that interested him. Of verbal 

 memory he had very little ; in spite of all his reading I 

 do not believe he knew half a dozen consecutive lines of 

 poetry by heart. What he did know was the substance of 

 what an author had written ; how it fitted into his own 

 scheme of knowledge ; and where to find any point again 

 when he wished to cite it. 



In his biological studies his immense knowledge was 

 firmly fixed in his mind by practical investigation ; as is 

 said above, he would take at second hand nothing for which 



