A STUDENT'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HUXLEY. 327 



surprise it occasioned in the knowledge that I was from American 

 soil. No reference to foreign studentship had heretofore been 

 made, and I was a little puzzled to know what kind of informa- 

 tion had led to the betrayal of my personality. Considerably 

 later I learned that a close friend of my father's, the late Prof. 

 Youmans himself a friend equally to science and to the scientific 

 student had addressed a personal note to Prof. Huxley, advising 

 him of my presence and commending me in the usual way to a 

 kind consideration and to an equally considerate esteem. It was 

 characteristic of the justness and fairness of the master that this 

 letter, while it may have paved the way to a more informal ac- 

 quaintance outside of the class room, in no way influenced favor- 

 itism within, or saved me from sound criticism of my work when 

 it merited it. This was not exactly at long intervals, and particu- 

 larly do I recall the painful awaiting of judgment on a mangled 

 dissection of the nerves of the frog. "Your blue papers are 

 where the red should be, and the sympathetic is gone " a piece 

 of information, the basis of a portion of which had already only 

 too keenly been realized. 



At no time was criticism given in a way to hurt, and more 

 commonly encouragement and commendation took the place of 

 criticism. But a thing had to be really well done to call out 

 praise, and an exuberance of it rarely broke an echo from the 

 laboratory walls. On one occasion I was startled by the inquiry 

 if my drawing a drawing of the division lines in the cells of a 

 certain water plant was made from the object or from imagina- 

 tion, an inquiry which threw doubt in my mind as to whether I 

 was receiving praise or condemnation. The representation was 

 considered unusually true to Nature, but I was forced to admit 

 that it was a combined product of the visual and mental eye, and 

 not a mere transcript of Nature. This explanation was in no way 

 a satisfaction to Prof. Huxley, who took the opportunity to ad- 

 monish the class that drawings, however true they may appear 

 to Nature, are only true when they strictly copy the objects which 

 they are intended to portray. 



Huxley himself was an excellent draughtsman, and it was 

 frequently remarked of him, as it was also of our own Dr. Leidy, 

 that had he devoted himself to painting, instead of to science, he 

 would have forced himself to a position not less prominent as 

 an artist than that which he occupied as a naturalist. He was 

 always precise in his drawings on the blackboard, and if he could 

 not, perhaps, like Prof. Weisbach, of Freiberg, jump to a circle 

 and punch its middle point with a stub of chalk, he could, appar- 

 ently without any hesitancy, draw the most complex anatomical 

 constructions, and in such a way as to make every point clearly 

 intelligible to the student. It was probably from the father's 



