APPENDICES 1455 



The other story, from a year or so later, was told me by a close 

 friend, George Murray, then keeper of Cryptogams in the Natural 

 History Museum, as he returned from a week-end at Down, to 

 which Darwin had invited a few other younger science-men from 

 the Museum and from Cambridge. Murray told how Darwin had spent 

 the previous evening questioning each, and drawing him out on his 

 subject; for no man was more open and eager to learn. Then, leaning 

 back in his chair, he said: "I am always feeling my ignorance, but 

 never have I had it more strongly brought home to me than 

 to-night. You have surprised me! — and again and again! What 

 you" (pointing in turn to each) "know about cryptogams, and you 

 tell me about phanerogams, and you about bacteriology, and you 

 about embryology, and you about fishes, and so on, is most interest- 

 ing! It's something astonishing! You do indeed make me feel my 

 ignorance, and what I have missed!" Pause: then jumping up from 

 his chair, and with thump on table: "But — damn you! — there's 

 not a Naturalist in the whole lot of you!" 



Was not that startling — and wellnigh Roman-father-like succes- 

 sion, first of laurelling, but then condemnation, — a great lesson, fit 

 to last through each life? Due appreciation of all specialisms, yet 

 right protest against their too great isolation, emphasis on biology 

 as conspecialism, visioning Nature and Life. 



Thus through life (as now, and emphatically, in this joint 

 endeavour before the reader), we are not content to continue simply 

 as field-naturalists, whether in the woods or by the sea. We go into 

 more deeply observant scrutinies, one after another, but also seek 

 more understanding of them in relation to the whole ; and we may 

 thus pass on Huxley's saying, "Any collector can show me species I 

 have not seen before, but the man I want is he who can tell me 

 something more about the commonest ones, dog or cat, horse and 

 cow, and so help me to understand them better." 



Hence, after Huxley's own naturalist's voyage, when he settled 

 to teaching, the great advance he made was that of the Biological 

 Laboratory, with its practical Type-system, a broad course on 

 chosen plant and animal types, from Amoeba to Hydra, bacterium 

 to alga, fern and flowering plant, and from worm to lobster, to fish 

 and frog, to bird and mammal. Here was a more varied and rapid, 

 more interesting and more instructive, because more compre- 

 hensive, introduction to biology, in its many aspects and problems, 

 than those of the traditional and separate academic courses, as of 

 botany and zoology in the first term of medicine, and anatomy and 

 physiology later. An excellent preparation for all these; as his own 

 further course showed, with its careful dissections and comparisons, 

 so illuminative of comparative anatomy, and of its applications to 

 the advance of classifications, in increasing approach to evolutionary 

 presentment. One recalls too his vivid teaching of elementary 



