THIRD LECTURE. 



A STUDENT'S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. 



HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN. 



(COLUMBIA COLLEGE, N. Y.) 



BY far the larger number of American students who go 

 abroad pass through the English Channel, obtain a distant 

 view of the mother country, and after from one to three years 

 in Germany, return with an exclusively German education. 

 Having visited neither England nor France, the implication 

 is that the countries which produced Owen, Darwin, Huxley, 

 Balfour, or Lamarck, Cuvier, St. Hilaire, and Pasteur have 

 nothing to offer the American student. But this is not the 

 fact. The fact is that England and France are a half-century 

 behind Germany in that kind of university organization which 

 attracts a foreign student, and enables him immediately to find 

 his level and enter upon his research. English and French 

 universities until a very recent date have been either not so 

 fully prepared, or have met the newcomer with practically 

 insuperable obstacles in the matter of a degree. 



None the less, the student who has not breasted these 

 obstacles for the compensating advantages which the English 

 and French schools offer has made a serious mistake. He has 

 brought back not an Old World education, but an exclusively 

 German education, with its splendidly sound and unique 

 features, and with many inherent defects. Germany produces 

 the generals and the rank and file of the armies of science, 

 but certainly the commanders-in-chief, in biology at least, have 

 been Englishmen. If we find the highest exponents of purely 

 inductive research in Germany, we certainly find a better union 



