AS A LECTURER 



435 



November fogs, " when neither sun nor stars in many days ap- 

 peared." " Never mind, Parker," he said, instantly capping my 

 quotation, " cast four anchors out of the stern and wish for day." 



Nothing, indeed, better illustrates this willingness to 

 listen to suggested improvements than the inversion of the 

 order of studies in the biological course which he inaugu- 

 rated in 1872, namely, the substitution of the anatomy of a 

 vertebrate for the microscopic examination of a unicellular 

 organism as the opening study. This was entirely Parker's 

 doing. " As one privileged at the time to play a minor 

 part," writes Professor Howes {Nature, January 6, 1898, 

 p. 228), " I well recall the determination in Parker's mind 

 that the change was desirable, and in Huxley's, that it was 

 not. Again and again did Parker appeal in vain, until at 

 last, on the morning of October 2, 1878, he triumphed." 



On his students he made a deep and lasting impression. 



His lectures (writes Jefifery Parker) were like his writings, 

 luminously clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to 

 the level of his audience ; eloquent, but with no trace of the 

 empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality ; full 

 of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; light- 

 ened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, 

 but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a 

 temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one 

 felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the de- 

 votion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem was 

 as fine a thing as to win a battle. He was an admirable 

 draughtsman, and his blackboard illustrations were always a 

 great feature of his lectures, especially when, to show the rela- 

 tion of two animal types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and 

 smudges, evolve the one into the other before our eyes. He 

 seemed to have a real affection for some of the specimens illus- 

 trating his lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving 

 manner; when he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would 

 sometimes thrown his arm over his shoulder of the skeleton be- 

 side him and take its hand, as if its silent companionship were 

 an inspiration. To me his lectures before his small class at 

 Jermyn Street or South Kensington were almost more impres- 

 sive than the discourses at the Royal Institution, where for an 

 hour and a half he poured forth a stream of dignified, earnest, 



