SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND 
141 
co-ordinate importance with Zoology, these two leading 
divisions of Biology will be treated separately by the lecturers 
in Botany and Zoology respectively,” raised the lecturer in 
Botany to the rank of professor. The change which is here 
referred to, whereby the biological curriculum for the first 
scientific examination of the University of London was 
greatly enlarged upon its botanical side, was made in the year 
1885, concurrently with the replacement of Botany by Biology 
in the first examinations for the medical degrees. 
That the new local colleges have not made their mark in the 
biological portions of the examinations for London is clear, 
and mainly, I believe, this is due to the method of teaching 
adopted. To take a single illustration:—In the scientific 
examinations for the London Science degrees, up to and 
including last year, the whole of the above provincial colleges, 
including Owens College, Manchester, have secured ten 
honours in Botany, of which five have fallen to Mason 
College, two to Owens College, two to the Yorkshire College 
at Leeds, and one to University College, Liverpool; in Zoo¬ 
logy the total number has been nineteen: fourteen to Owens, 
three to Mason College, and one each to Leeds and Liverpool. 
Thus more than half of the honours secured to the younger 
provincial colleges have fallen to the college in which the 
subject of Biology has been taught by two teachers of equal 
standing and approximately equal facilities; and the quality 
of the honours obtained but emphasises this statement. 
But in the last two or three years two remarkable steps 
in a part reversion to the status quo ante 1875 have been made. 
One of these has been the withdrawal of Professors Huxley 
and Michael Foster, in London and Cambridge respectively, 
from the direct work of teaching “Biology,” and in each of 
these cases, while the subject as such is retained, the teaching 
has been divided, the botanical and zoological portions being 
taken by a botanist and zoologist respectively. The second 
reversion is in its way no less remarkable. The ideal 
teaching of Biology commenced amongst those simple phases 
of life in which plant and animal find their common origin, 
and from that point, as in following up the two arms of a 
letter V, the two sides of life were followed up, diverging as 
they went, until in their culminating points they were so 
remote as to show no surface relationship together. This, 
too, is now altered, and instead the study is pursued, as 
philosophically it should be pursued, from the known to the 
unknown, from the highly developed to the simple. But this 
it is not difficult to see, alters the whole basis of biological 
teaching as heretofore understood. 
