96 



NA TUKE 



[November 22 1900 



time devoted to classics has entirely failed in its object. The 

 mind is like the body— it requires change. Mutton is excellent 

 food ; but mutton for breakfast, mutton for lunch, and mutton 

 for dinner would soon make any one hate the sight of mutton, 

 and so Latin grammar before breakfast, Latin grammar before 

 lunch, and Latin grammar before dinner is enough to make al- 

 most any one hate the sight of a classical author. Moreover, the 

 classics, though an important part, are not the whole of educa- 

 tion, and a classical scholar, however profound, if he knows no 

 science, is but a half-educated man after all. 



In fact, Huxley was no opponent of a classical educition in 

 the proper sense of the term, but he did protest against it in the 

 sense in which it is usually employed, namely, as an education 

 from which science is excluded, or represented only by a few 

 random lectures. 



He considered that specialisation should not begin till 

 sixteen or seventeen. At present we begin in our Public School 

 system to specialise at the very beginning, and to devote an over- 

 whelming time to Latin and Greek, which, after all, the boys 

 are not taught to speak. Huxley advocated the system adopted 

 by the founders of the University of London, and maintained to 

 the present day that no one should be given a degree who did 

 not show some acquaintance with science and with at least one 

 modern language. 



"As for the so-called 'conflict of studies,'" he exclaims, 

 *'one might as well inquire which of the terms of a Rule of 

 Three sum one ought to know in order to get a trustworthy 

 result. Practical life is such a sum, in which your duty multi- 

 plied into your capacity, and divided by your circumstances, 

 gives you the fourth term in the proportion, which is your 

 deserts, with great accuracy" (" Life of Prof Huxley," p. 406). 



" That man," he said,'" I think, has had a liberal education, 

 who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready ser- 

 vant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work 

 that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a 

 •clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and 

 in smooth working order ; ready, like a steam engine, to be 

 turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as 

 forge the anchors of the mind ; whose mind is stored with a 

 knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and 

 the laws of her operations ; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full 

 of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel 

 by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience ; who has 

 learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate 

 all vileness and to respect others as himself." 



He was also strongly of opinion that colleges should be places 

 of research as well as of teaching. 



"The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of 

 new knowledge ; its professors have to be at the top of the 

 wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath 

 of their nostrils ; laboratory work the main business of the 

 scientific student ; books his main helpers. 



Education has been advocated for many good reasons : by 

 statesmen because all have votes, by Chambers of Commerce 

 because ignorance makes bad workmen, by the clergy because 

 it makes bad men, and all these are excellent reasons ; but they 

 may all be summed up in Huxley's words that " the masses 

 should be educated because they are men and women with un- 

 limited capacities of being, doing and suffering, and that it is as 

 true now as ever it was that the people perish for lack of 

 knowledge." 



Huxley once complained to Tyndall, in joke, that the clergy 

 seemed to let him say anything he liked, " while they attack 

 me for a word or a phrase." But it was not always so. 



Tyndall and I went, in the spring of 1874, to Naples to see 

 an eruption of Vesuvius. At one side the edge of the crater 

 shelved very gradually to the abyss, and, being anxious to obtain 

 the best possible view, I went a little over the ridge. In the 

 autumn Tyndall delivered his celebrated address to the British 

 Association at Belfast. This was much admired, much read, 

 but also much criticised, and one of the papers had an article on 

 Huxley and Tyndall, praising Huxley very much at Tyndall's 

 expense, and ending with this delightful little bit of bathos : — 

 *' In conclusion, we do not know that we can better illustrate 

 Prof. Tyndall's foolish recklessness, and the wise, practical 

 character of Prof. Huxley, than by mentioning the simple fact 

 that last spring, at the very moment when Prof Tyndall foolishly 

 entered the crater of Vesuvius during an eruption, Prof. Huxley, 

 on the contrary, took a seat on the London School Board." 



Tyndall, however, returned from Naples with fresh life and 



health, while the strain of the School Board told considerably 

 on Huxley's health. 



Huxley's attitude on the School Board with reference to Bible 

 teaching came as a surprise to those who did not know him 

 well. He supported Mr. W. H. Smith's motion in its favour, 

 which indeed was voted for by all the members except six, 

 three of whom were the Roman Catholics, who did not vote 

 either way. 



" I have been," he said, "seriously perplexed to know by 

 what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the 

 essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present 

 utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the 

 use of the Bible. Take the Bible as a whole ; make the 

 severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for short- 

 comings and positive errors ; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher 

 would do if left to himself, all that it is not desirable for children 

 to occupy themselves with ; and there still remains in this old 

 literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And 

 then consider the great historical fact that for three centuries 

 this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and 

 noblest in English history ; that it has become the national epic 

 of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from John o' 

 Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso were once 

 to Italians ; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, 

 and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, 

 finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village 

 to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other 

 civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest 

 limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what 

 other book could children be so much hummised and made to 

 feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like 

 themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two 

 eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, ac- 

 cording to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also 

 are earning their payment for their work ? " 

 ( To be continued). 



NO. 1621, VOL. 63] 



THE Nb\ilBERS OF THE AMERICAN BISON. 



T T is eleven years since Mr. Hornaday published his interesting 

 account of the extermination of the American Bison— a work 

 that was fully noticed in these columns at the time. The author 

 then estimated the number of living survivors of the species at 

 1091, of which 256 were in captivity and 835 running wild in 

 British North America, the Yellowstone Park, and a few other 

 localities. Recently Mr. Mark Sullivan has attempted to make 

 a fresh census of the species, the results of which form the sub- 

 ject of a long article published in the Boston Evening Transcript 

 of October 10. 



As the result of his inquiries, Mr. Sullivan estimates the 

 number of bison living at the present time as approximately 

 1024, of which 684 are in captivity and 340 running wild or half 

 wild. His investigations appear to have been conducted with 

 great care ; and in the case of the greater number of domestic ated 

 herds — whether American or foreign — the numbers are practically 

 accurate. The number of those running wild in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the Great Slave Lake has, however, been arrived at 

 by a process of " averaging ; " and the extent of the herd in the 

 Yellowstone is to a large degree a matter of guess-work. 

 Another element of uncertainty is introduced by the alleged ex- 

 istence of wild bison in the mountains of Colorado ; for while a 

 Government official vouches for their occurrence in considerable 

 numbers, old bison-hunters are very sceptical whether there are 

 any at all. Admitting that the report of their existence in this 

 district may be true, the author allows 21 as their conjectural 

 number. He adds that reports of wild bison in other parts of 

 the United States are pure fabrications. 



The largest herd of pure-bred domesticated bison living in the 

 United States is one belonging to the heirs of the late Mr. C. 

 AUard, which ranges over the Flathead Indian Reserve in 

 Montana, and numbers 259 head. Next to this comes the herd 

 of Mr. Jones Goodnight, in Armstrong County, Texas, with a 

 total of 1 10 head. The number living in countries other than 

 America is given at 100, of which 26 are in England, the Duke 

 of Bedford's herd of 12 at Woburn Abbey being probably the 

 largest in this country. 



Whatever may be the real number of wild bison, it is evident 

 from the figures given above that they have decreased very 

 seriously since 1887, while those living in captivity exhibit, on 



