BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 853 



in convincing juries, and they are formidable at dinner-tables. It 

 would not be fair, however, not to say that a purely literary train- 

 ing can do much better things than this. By a purely classical 

 education a man, from being forced into seeing and feeling that 

 other men could look upon the world, moral, social, and physical, 

 with other (even if not with larger) eyes than ours, attains a cer- 

 tain flexibility of mind which enables him to enter into the 

 thoughts of other and living men ; and this is a very desirable 

 attainment. And, finally, though I should be sorry to hold with a 

 French writer that the style makes the man, the benefit of being 

 early familiarised with writings which the peculiar social condition 

 of the classical times, so well pointed out by De Tocqueville (' De 

 la Democratic en Am^rique,' i. 15), conspired and contributed not 

 a little to make models of style, is not to be despised. Such a 

 familiarity may not confer the power of imitating or rivalling such 

 compositions, but it may confer the power of appreciating their 

 excellences, the one power appearing to us to be analogous to the 

 power of the experimenter, and the other to that of the pure ob- 

 server in Natural Science ; and we should undervalue neither. 



Masters of Science, it must be confessed, are not always masters 

 of style ; let not the single instance of last night tempt you to 

 generalise, it is but a single instance, the writings of the man 

 whom we in this section are most of us likely to look upon as our 

 master in Science have been spoken of by our President in his 

 recently published volume as 'intellectual pemmican^;' and if 

 scientific reading and teaching is to be divorced from scientific ob- 

 servation of natural objects and processes, it is better that a man, 

 young or old, should have in his memory something which is per- 

 fect of its kind, entire and unmutilated, such as the opening 

 sentences of the ' Brutus ' of Cicero, which Tacitus, I think, must 

 have had in his memory when he wrote his obituary of Agricola, or 

 as the opening sentences of the ' Kepublic ' of Plato, or the conclu- 

 sion of the 'Ajax' of Sophocles, than that he should have his 

 memory laden with a consignment of scientific phrases which, ex 

 hypothesis have for him no vital reality. I have already said that I 

 am strongly of opinion that literary should always be combined 

 with scientific instruction in a perfect educational course; these 



* [Professor Huxley was President of the British Association at the meeting at 

 which this Address was delivered. — Editor.] 



