178 Thomas Henry Huxley 



If a man wishes to be a chemist, it is necessary not 

 only that he should read chemical books and attend 

 chemical lectures, but that he should actually perform 

 the fundamental experiments in the laboratory for him- 

 self, and thus learn exactly what the words which he 

 reads in his books and hears from his teachers, mean, 

 " If you want a man to be a tea-merchant, you don't 

 tell him to read books about China or about tea, but you 

 put him into a tea- merchant's office where he has the 

 handling, the smelling, and the tasting of tea. With- 

 out the sort of knowledge which can be gained only in 

 this practical wa}-, his exploits as a tea-merchant will 

 soon come to a bankrupt termination." The great and 

 obvious difficulty in tlie practical teaching of biology 

 appeared to be the immense number of different kinds 

 of animals and plants in existence. A human life 

 would not suffice for the examination of a hundredth 

 part of these. Huxley met the difficulty by the 

 " type " system. 



"There are certainly more than loo.ocx) species of insects, 

 and yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen 

 one, will be able to have a fair conception of the struct- 

 ure of the whole. I do not mean to say he will know that 

 structure thoroughly, or as well as is desirable that he should 

 know it ; but he will have enough real knowledge to enable 

 him to understand what he reads, to have genuine images in 

 his mind of these structures which become so variously modi- 

 fied in all the foims of insects he has not seen. In fact, there 

 are such things as types of form among animals and vegetables, 

 and for the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what 

 constitutes the leading modifications of animal and plant life, 

 it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small 

 number of animals and plants." 



The type system in itself was not absolutely new. 

 Rolleston, the Linacre professor at Oxford, in his Fonns 



