330 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



taken for health recuperation, had he abstained from public de- 

 liverances. 



It has been frequently assumed that Huxley cared for little 

 beyond science, and especially for that side of it which was com- 

 bative either with the Church or with the State, but nothing 

 could be further from the truth than the belief that this was in 

 fact the case. It is perfectly true that Huxley used all the vigor 

 of speech of which he was capable to emphasize what he consid- 

 ered to be the proper position of science in any education, and per- 

 haps he even considered the acquisition of scientific knowledge to 

 be of more importance than any other form of learning, but he 

 was always careful to emphasize that education was only such 

 when it was broad and comprehensive, when it comprised not only 

 science, but in addition a goodly share of the world's history and 

 literature. His own resource in the" fields of literature (English, 

 French, German, and Italian) and history was prodigious, and he 

 rarely was at a loss to instantly take advantage of a citation from 

 some early scholar to demolish at first or second hand an adver- 

 sary at arms. When I was in London he was reading, with the 

 assistance of a friend, Russian, and mainly for the purpose of fully 

 familiarizing himself with the work of the great anatomist, A. 

 Kovalewski, whose writings he was seemingly the first to bring 

 to the critical notice of English-speaking naturalists. It was this 

 thorough familiarity with what one is almost tempted to call uni- 

 versal knowledge that made Prof. Huxley such a dreaded foe to 

 his enemies, and it has well been remarked, " Woe be to him who 

 attempts to measure arms with such an antagonist ! " 



Huxley was a firm believer in thorough knowledge, and he took 

 no stock in brain-stuffing ; to have known a thing once, and to be 

 able to put your hand upon it when you again want it, was his 

 maxim. The opening address delivered by him before the Johns 

 Hopkins University, in 1876, gives the keynote to his position in 

 the matter of special training. " Know a thing directly," he often 

 remarked, " and do not assume that you know more of it by know- 

 ing around it." He had no patience with those who spoke with a 

 pseudo-authority begotten of chance, and was bitter in his denun- 

 ciation of officialism as affording a pretext for either defending or 

 attacking scientific dogma. An interesting anecdote, which Prof. 

 Huxley himself related to me, shows the occasional happy frame 

 of mind in which our savant found himself when he, in turn, was 

 receiving blows. A prominent bishop of the English Church, 

 whose name it is not here necessary to mention, had been for some 

 time endeavoring to smash the Darwinian hypothesis through 

 some actual researches in zoology which he claimed to have under- 

 taken. Toward the accomplishment of this laudable effort he 

 used many pages of the current magazines and equally many 



