University Education 197 



results. A certain number of teachers made it their 

 chief effort to secure the largest possible number of 

 grants. Huxle}^ regarded these as poachers of the 

 worst kind, and did all he could to foil them. He did 

 all he could to promote systematic practical instruction 

 in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired to learn 

 their business more thoroughl}'. He insisted again 

 and again upon the popular nature of the classes ; 

 their great advantage was that they were accessible to 

 all who chose to avail themselves of them after work- 

 ing hours, and that they brought the means of instruc- 

 tion to the doors of the factories and workshops. 

 The subjects which he considered of most importance 

 were foreign languages, drawing, and elementary sci- 

 ences, and he wished them to be used first of all by 

 those who were handicraftsmen and who therefore 

 left the elementary schools at the age of thirteen or 

 fourteen. 



In a lecture given at the formal opening of the Johns 

 Hopkins University at Baltimore in 1876, and in a Rec- 

 torial address to the University of Aberdeen two 3^ears 

 earlier, Huxley laid down the general lines of univers- 

 ity education as he conceived it. He began by sup- 

 posing that a good primary education had already 

 been received. 



"Sucti an education should enable an average boy of fifteen 

 or sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and 

 accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from 

 the study of our classic writers ; to have a general acquaintance 

 with the history of his own country and with the great laws of 

 social existence ; to have acquired the rudiments of the phys- 

 ical and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of ele- 

 mentary arithmetic and geometry. He should have obtained 

 an acquaintance with logic rather by example than by precept ; 



