i 4 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES 



All real scientific work has this distinctive 

 mark : it is reproductive and fertile, it gives birth 

 to other scientific work following upon itself, and 

 that in two ways. It is reproductive in the way 

 of the parentage of fact; each new discovery of 

 real worth becomes the starting-point of new 

 inquiries, leading in turn to new discoveries. It 

 is also reproductive in the way of the parentage 

 of spirit and of method; and this parentage is, 

 perhaps, the more fertile of the two. The new 

 discovery, the new fact made known, the new view 

 put forward and commanding assent, is, often at 

 least, the outcome of a new way of looking at 

 things; and that new way of looking at things 

 spreads among those who are working at the same 

 subject. Again and again the appearance of a 

 memoir or a book has acted like a magnet, turn- 

 ing men's minds from looking in one direction and 

 making them look in another. Huxley's work in 

 Comparative Anatomy or perhaps I ought to 

 use a wider phrase, and say in Biology was of 

 the reproductive kind, and reproductive especi- 

 ally by way of parentage of method. 



When he sailed away from England on board 

 the Rattlesnake much, if not nearly all, the work 

 which was being done, and for many years past 

 had been done, in England at least, in the way of 

 enlarging our knowledge of animal forms, con- 

 sisted, on the one hand, in the careful but dull 

 accumulation of facts, unillumined by any thought 

 as to what was the real meaning of the facts so 



