Mention has been made of his lectures to working men.  Of these his assistant and successor, Professor G.B.  Howes, wrote:—­

Great as were his class lectures, his working-men’s were greater.  Huxley was a great believer in the distillatio per ascensum of scientific knowledge and culture, and spared no pains in approaching the artisan and so-called “working classes.”  He gave the workmen of his best.  The substance of his Man’s Place in Nature, one of the most successful and popular of his writings, and of his Crayfish, perhaps the most perfect zoological treatise ever published, was first communicated to them.  In one of the last conversations I had with him, I asked his views on the desirability of discontinuing the workmen’s lectures at Jermyn Street, since the development of working men’s colleges and institutes is regarded by some to have rendered their continuance unnecessary.  He replied, almost with indignation:  “With our central position and resources, we ought to be in a position to give the workmen that which they cannot get elsewhere”; adding that he would deeply deplore any such discontinuance.

He had begun these in 1855, the second year of his appointment at the Royal School of Mines.  On February 27 of that year he wrote to his friend Dr. Dyster:—­

I enclose a prospectus of some People’s Lectures (Popular Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about to give here.  I want the working classes to understand that Science and her ways are great facts for them—­that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest, not because fellows in black with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of nature which they must obey “under penalties.”

    I am sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to try
    what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among
    facts.

And in May, after referring to his Preliminary Course and the earnestness and attention of his audience, he adds that he has begun his similar course to working men exclusively—­a series of six, given in turn by each Professor:—­

The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full.  I believe in the fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I would willingly give some when I come to Tenby [Dr. Dyster’s home].

Moreover, he took a practical interest in the corresponding movement set afoot by F.D.  Maurice, and gave occasional addresses at the Working Men’s College between 1857 and 1877, the last of which was that delightful discourse on science as “trained and organized common sense” which bears the alluring title of “The Method of Zadig.”

IX

POPULAR EDUCATION