I So Thomas Henry Huxley 



the lecture. This condition continned practically to 

 1872. But a few years before that Huxley and his 

 colleagues got up a kind of pronunciamento deploring 

 the existing state of affairs. In his evidence before 

 the Royal Conunission of 1S70 Huxley said : " There is 

 a complete want in the School of Mines, as it now ex- 

 ists, of an}' means of teaching several of the subjects 

 practically. For example, I am set there to teach 

 natural history without a biological laboratory and 

 without the means of shewing a single dissection." 

 Against strong internal opposition and at considerable 

 pecuniary loss Huxley and some of his colleagues suc- 

 ceeded, in 1872, in getting the School of Mines trans- 

 ferred to South Kensington, where it became the Royal 

 College of Science. For the first course of instruction 

 given in the new buildings, Huxley obtained the aid 

 of Prof. M. Foster, Prof. Rutherford, and Prof. Ray 

 Lankester. The laboratory course originated by Hux- 

 ley and shaped by him with these three distinguished 

 assistants became the model of the regular courses 

 given subsequently, and, with various slight modifi- 

 cations, has since been adopted almost universally. 

 Later on, Huxley described it as follows : 



" I lecture to a class of students daily for about four months 

 and a half, and my class have, of course, their text-books ; but 

 the essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I re- 

 gard as really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for 

 practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances 

 needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly ar- 

 ranged in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instru- 

 ments, and we work through the structure of a certain number 

 of plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we 

 take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, 

 a fern, and some flowering plant ; among animals we exam- 

 ine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water 



