298 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xx 



Some whales have all the cerebral vertebrae free now, and 

 every one of them has the full number, seven, whether they are 

 free or fixed. No doubt whales had hind legs once upon a time. 

 If when you come up to town you go to the College of Surgeons, 

 my friend Flower the Conservator (a good man whom you 

 should know), will show you the whalebone whale's thigh bones 

 in the grand skeleton they have recently set up. The legs, to be 

 sure, and the feet are gone, the battle of life having left private 

 Cetacea in the condition of a Chelsea pensioner. — Ever yours 

 faithfully, T. H. Huxley. 



This year the British Association met at Nottingham, 

 and Huxley was president of Section D. In this capacity 

 he invited Professor Haeckel to attend the meeting, but the 

 impending war with Austria prevented any Prussian from 

 leaving his country at the time, though Haeckel managed to 

 come over later. 



Huxley did not deliver a regular opening address to the 

 section on the Thursday, but on the Friday made a speech, 

 which was followed by a discussion upon biology and its 

 several branches, especially morphology and its relation to 

 physiology (" the facts concerning form are questions of 

 force, every form is force visible.") He lamented that the 

 subdivisions of the section had to meet separately as a re- 

 sult of specialisation, the reason for which he found in the 

 want of proper scientific education in schools. And this 

 was the fault of the universities, for just as in the story, 

 " Stick won't beat dog, dog won't bite pig, and so the old 

 woman can't get home," science would not be taught in 

 the schools until it is recognised by the universities. 



This prepared the way for Dean Farrar's paper on 

 science teaching in the public schools. His experience as a 

 master at Harrow made him strongly oppose the existing 

 plan of teaching all boys classical composition whether they 

 were suited for it or no. He wished to exchange a great 

 deal of Latin verse-making for elementary science. 



This paper was doubly interesting to Huxley, as coming 

 from a classical master in a public school, and he remarked, 

 " He felt sure that at the present time, the important ques- 

 tion for England was not the duration of her coal, but the 



