376 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. 



of detail, accepted suggestions with the greatest courtesy 

 and good humour, and was always ready with a kindly 

 and humorous word of encouragement in times of 

 difficulty. I was once grumbling to him ahout how 

 hard it was to carry on the work of the laboratory 

 through a long series of November fogs, " when neither 

 sun nor stars in many days appeared." " Never mind, 

 Parker," he said, instantly capping my -quotation, " cast 

 four anchors out of the stern and wish for day." 



Nothing, indeed, better illustrates this willingness 

 to listen to suggested improvements than the in- 

 version of the order of studies in the biological 

 course which he inaugurated in 1872, namely, the 

 substitution of the anatomy of a vertebrate for the 

 microscopic examination of a unicellular organism as 

 the opening study. This was entirely Parker's doing. 

 " As one privileged at the time to play a minor part," 

 writes Professor Howes {Nature, January 6, 1898, 

 p. 228), " I well recall the determination in Parker's 

 mind that the change was desirable, and in Huxley's, 

 that it was not. Again and again did Parker appeal 

 in vain, until at last, on the morning of October 2, 

 1878, he triumphed." 



On his students he made a deep and lasting 

 impression. 



His lectures (writes Jeffery Parker) were like his 

 writings, luminously clear, without the faintest disposi- 

 tion 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 an 

 occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but 



