XV AS A LECTURER 379 



The great value of Huxley's anatomical ideas, and the 

 admirable clearness with which he exjilained them, led 

 me in the autumn of 1861 to seek admission as a student 

 to his course of lectures at the School of Mines in Jermyn 

 Street. When I entered his small room there to make 

 this request, he was giving the finishing touches to a 

 dissection of part of the nervous system of a skate, 

 worked out for the benefit of his students. He welcomed 

 my application with the greatest cordiality, save that he 

 insisted I should be only an honorary student, or rather, 

 should assist at his lectures as a friend. I availed myself 

 of his permission on the very next day, and subsequently 

 attended almost all his lectures there and elsewhere, so 

 that he one day said to me, " I shall call you my 

 ' constant reader.' " To be such a reader was to me an 

 inestimable privilege, and so I shall ever consider it. I 

 have heard many men lecture, but I never heard any one 

 lecture as did Professor Huxley. He was my very ideal of 

 a lecturer. Distinct in utterance, with an agreeable voice, 

 lucid as it was possible to be in exposition, with ad- 

 mirably cliosen language, sufficiently rapid, yet never 

 hurried, often impressive in manner, yet never otherwise 

 than completely natural, and sometimes allowing Ms 

 audience a glimpse of that rich fund of humour ever 

 ready to well forth when occasion permitted, sometimes 

 accompanied with an extra gleam in his bright dark eyes, 

 sometimes expressed with a dryness and gravity of look 

 which gave it a double zest. 



I shall never forget the first time I saw him enter his 

 lecture-room. He came in rapidly, yet without bustle, 

 and as the clock striick, a brief glance at his audience and 

 then at once to work. He had the excellent habit of 

 beginning each lecture (save, of course, the first) w^ith a 

 recapitulation of the main points of the preceding 

 one. The course was amply illustrated by excellent 

 coloured diagrams, which, I believe, he had made ; but 

 still more valuable were the chalk sketches he would 



