2IO Thomas Henry Huxley 



the method of comparative anatomy, the result of a 

 habit of thinking which makes it impossible to have 

 any set of ideas brought into the mind without an 

 immediate, almost unconscious, overhauling of the 

 memory for atiy other ideas at all congruous. In a 

 strict scientific exposition Huxley would choose from 

 the multitude of possible comparisons that most simple 

 and most intelligible to his audience ; when in a lighter 

 vein, he gave play to a natural humour in his choice. 

 Instances of his method of exposition by comparison 

 abound in his published addresses. I^et us take one 

 or two. In the course of an address to a large mixed 

 audience so early in his public career as 1854, i^ mak- 

 ing plain to them the proposition, somewhat novel for 

 those days, that the natural history sciences had an 

 educational value, he explained that the faculties em- 

 ployed in that subject were simply those of the com- 

 mon sense of every-day life. 



" The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mysti- 

 cal faculties, by no mental processes other than those which 

 are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest 

 affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from 

 the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with 

 that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Mont- 

 tnartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process 

 of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of 

 a peculiar kind on her dress, concludes that somebody has 

 upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way, in kind, from 

 that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet." 



In one of his addresses to working men on Man' s 

 Place in Nature he shewed that from time to time in 

 the history of the world average persons of the hu- 

 man race have accepted some kind of answer to the 

 insoluble riddles of existence, but that from time to 



