SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
137 
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF SCIENCE 
TEACHING IN ENGLAND; 
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO BOTANY. 
Address to the Birmingham Natural History and Microscopical 
Society, as Retiring President, by 
W. HILLHOUSE, M.A., F.L.S. 
(professor of botany and vegetable physiology, MASON science 
COLLEGE, BIRMINGHAM). 
(Continued from page 120.) 
Bat time warns me that I must pass away from the 
school, in order briefly to consider the position of affairs in 
higher teaching; here, however, confining my attention 
mainly to the subject of Botany. 
From a botanical point of view the last fifteen years or so, 
so fraught with great results in our national education move¬ 
ment, are specially marked by three important changes. The 
first of these is the rise of a new subject of education, or 
rather of a systematic combination of portions of three old 
subjects, to which the name of “Biology” is given. Professor 
Huxley, who must be looked upon as the founder of this new 
teaching, thus explains his position in the preface to his 
“Course in Practical Biology,” 1875:—“I arrived at the 
conviction that the study of living bodies is really one 
discipline, which is divided into Zoology and Botany simply 
as a matter of convenience, and that the scientific zoologist 
should no more be ignorant of the fundamental phenomena of 
vegetable life, than the scientific botanist of those of animal 
existence.” Again, more recently (November, 1887), in a 
new edition of the same work, he says:—“No man can be 
competent to deal with the greater problems of Biology as 
they are now presented to us, unless he has made a survey, 
at once conprehensive and thorough, of the whole field of 
biological investigation. The animal and the vegetable 
world are only two aspects of the same fundamental series of 
phenomena, and each is capable of throwing a flood of light 
upon the other.” This assertion of the unity of life is, I 
venture to think, one of the greatest features of Huxley’s 
life work. Biology, as taught by Professor Huxley, consisted 
in the successive study, structural and functional, of a small 
number of selected plants and animals, used as “ types.” 
Commencing with yeast and Protococcus on the one hand, and 
Amoeba on the other, as illustrating some of the simplest phases 
of plant and animal life respectively, it progressed by greater 
