LONDON SCHOOL BOARD 99 



Commission on Trawl, Net and Beam Trawl Fishing 

 (1884). 



Administrative work in connection with various learned 

 societies consumed an increasing amount of time, especially 

 the heavy duties associated with the Secretaryship of the 

 Royal Society, which he held from 1872-81, afterwards 

 becoming President (1883-5). 



Before 1870 Huxley had not been content merely with 

 demonstrating, by the example of his own courses, the 

 methods which ought to be employed in order to make 

 the specialist teaching of science really efficient, but he 

 had also taken every opportunity of expressing his views 

 as to the place of science in a school curriculum, and as 

 to the unsatisfactory nature of school education in Britain 

 {cf. p. 91). Largely as the result of the part he 

 played in the intellectual renascence to which the theory 

 of evolution gave so powerful an impetus, profound dis- 

 content had gradually arisen in this country with the dis- 

 organized state of elementary education, which found 

 practical expression in the passing of W. E. Forster's 

 Education Act in 1870. 



Huxley fortunately conceived it to be his duty to offer 

 himself as a candidate for the first London School Board, 

 and without taking any steps beyond some addresses given 

 at public meetings, was returned for the Marylebone 

 division on November 29, being second on the poll. 

 His reasons for coming forward are thus summarized by 

 Mr. Leonard Huxley (Life, i, p. 337) : — 



" This [i.e., the London School Board] was the practical out- 

 come of the rising interest in education all over the country ; on 

 its working, he felt, depended momentous issues — the fostering of 

 the moral and physical well-being of the nation ; the quickening 

 of its intelligence and the maintenance of its commercial 

 suprertiacy. Withal, he desired to temper ' book-learning ' with 



