“utter ignorance as to the simplest laws of their own animal life, which prevails among even the most highly educated persons in this country.”  “I am addressing,” he said, “I imagine, an audience of cultivated persons; and yet I dare venture to assert that, with the exception of those of my hearers who may chance to have received a medical education, there is not one who could tell me what is the meaning and use of an act which he performs a score of times every minute, and whose suspension would involve his immediate death:—­I mean the act of breathing—­or who could state in precise terms why it is that a confined atmosphere is injurious to health.”

The power to express the precise meaning of even a common physiological act is probably not yet possessed by all educated people:  but no one can doubt that there is now a very generally diffused knowledge of and interest in the ordinary processes of living bodies.  It is almost impossible for any of us to escape some amount of scientific education at school, at college, from lectures, or from books.  Certainly those of us who have a natural inclination towards knowledge of that kind can hardly fail to have the opportunity of acquiring it.  Every library abounds in elementary and advanced scientific books; every university and many schools have their lectures and laboratories for science, and there is scientific teaching involved in every educational curriculum.  To attempt a complete account of how this radical change in the attitude of the world to science has come about would be to attempt to write the history of European civilisation in the last half-century.  A thousand causes have been contributory; but among these causes two have been of extraordinary importance—­an idea and a man.  The idea is the conception of organic evolution, and the man was Huxley.  The idea of evolution clothed the dead bones of anatomy with a fair and living flesh, and the new body left the dusty corners of museums to pervade the world, arousing the attention and interest of all.  A large part of the prodigious mental activities of Huxley was devoted to compelling the world to take an interest in biological science.  Had his life-work been no more than this side of it, it would have been of commanding importance.  A mere enumeration of the modes in which he assisted in arousing attention to science among all classes would fill many pages.  Almost before he was settled in London, in the lecture from which we quoted at the beginning of this chapter he urged the “educational value of the natural history sciences.”  In 1869 in a speech in Liverpool; in 1870 at University College, London; in 1874 as his Rectorial address in the University of Aberdeen; in 1876 at the opening ceremonial of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore; in the same year at South Kensington; in 1877 in a separate essay; in 1881 in an address to the International Medical Congress:  at these different times and addressing different and important audiences he continued to urge the absolute necessity of a knowledge of nature.  A well-known and eloquent passage from an address on “a liberal education” delivered to working men in 1868 contains the gist of his reiterated argument: