1348 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



audience — be it young or grown matters little — we soon find them 

 willing and often eager; for they soon see how we must keep clear 

 notes and names of what flowers, which insects, are involved in 

 these varied and fascinating interactions, in their real life, and 

 towards life anew. See how London citizens, as well as country 

 visitors, crowd in thousands to Kew Gardens and to the Zoo, since 

 there all is living ; yet in the great Natural History Museum — albeit 

 so incomparably richer and more orderly for science — they are easy 

 to count, especially in the long galleries beyond the Central Hall 

 so vividly and "popularly" (i.e. vitally and evolutionally) arranged 

 so that all may see ; while the great Herbarium upstairs, and again 

 that outside Kew Gates — though each a hortus siccus, a concen- 

 trated World-Garden — is only for consultation by the specialist 

 inquirer. 



Again, youths often take to medicine with real interest; yet only 

 one in a hundred of these yet comes to anatomy for its own sake, 

 though Huxley was far from being the only teacher who could make 

 drv bones live. But when one makes up his mind for medicine, 

 common sense shows him he must learn anatomy, and for surgery 

 more still; yet it is again but a minute percentage even of these 

 good students who become initiated far enough to feel the enthralling 

 interest which makes anatomy professors, and again from among 

 these the fully comparative anatomist. Only when this stage is being 

 reached, and that of the comparative physiologist as well, can such 

 a museum as the Hunterian, in the Royal College of Surgeons, with 

 its wealth of significances and suggestions, be adequately appre- 

 ciated — ^while the public who may stray in, see mainly the giant's 

 skeleton as a curiosity, and the megalocephalic dwarf's as a horror; 

 since these at least each give them its realisation of the formidable 

 possibilities of life. 



Life: that is the magic word which revives all dry bones, and 

 these throughout all studies: and hence as schools and universities 

 return to Life — and this in evolution — as they are indeed doing, 

 albeit still too partially and too slowly — their vitalised interest and 

 effectiveness will soon rise into a Revivance, and this veritably 

 evolutionary, compared with which even the glories of the Renais- 

 sance were but of early and soon clouded dawn. 



Here then is the secret of education, biological and general alike. 

 Ordinary human and social life are, and can but be, essentially 

 interested in the living, far beyond all due conservation of memorials 

 of the dead, as in cemetery or library, in museum of relics or even 

 portrait-gallery. Yet when all these are reimited into more life- 

 like presentment, be it but as in Madame Tussaud's waxworks, the 

 public go in their crowds again; yet most of all to the play or 

 pageant, since there even antiquity seems really in life. 



Thus too it was that the world's unquestionably foremost teacher 



