174 Thomas Henry Huxley 



students to regard any form of life not merely as a 

 highly complicated and deeply interesting anatomical 

 study, but as a creature that is only one out of an in- 

 numerable host of living things, every fibre in its 

 bod}', ever)^ rhythm in its functions proclaiming the 

 degree and nature of its relationship to other animals. 

 R. Louis Stevenson, writing of his native town, tried to 

 give "a vision of Edinburgh, not as you see her, in 

 the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon 

 the round world, with all Europe and the deep sea for 

 her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the 

 earth, whence highways radiate, or ships set sail for 

 foreign ports ; the limit of a parish is not more imagin- 

 ary than the frontier of an empire." It is this wider 

 sweep, this attempt to see and to teach not merely the 

 facts about things but the relations of these facts to the 

 similar facts in other things, that makes the difference 

 between the new knowledge and the old. The quest- 

 ions to be asked and answered are not merely, What 

 are the structures in this animal ? but, How and why do 

 they come to be what they are ? Huxley was a ruthless 

 enemy of the books and teachers which or who made 

 the mere acquisition of details of knowledge their chief 

 object. 



" I remember," he wrote, " iu my youtb there were detest- 

 able books which ought to have been burued by the hands of 

 the common hangman, for they contained questions and an- 

 swers to be learned by heart, of this sort, 'What is a horse? 

 The horse is termed Equiis caballiis ; belongs to the class 

 Mammalia ; order, Pachydermata ; family, Solidungula.' Was 

 an}- human being the wiser for learning that magic formula? 

 Was he not more foolish inasmuch as he was deluded into 

 taking words for knowledge ? " 



Huxley himself admitted his diflScuIty in remembering 



