“You young men cannot realise your advantages; you have brought to you for study at your leisure in London, creatures that I had to lash my microscope to the mast to get a glimpse of.”  Huxley’s books were written for students with fewer advantages, and, naturally, laid more stress on the harder skeletal parts and such structures as could be more easily preserved; but with this inevitable limitation they still serve as luminous and comprehensive guides to the subjects of which they treat.  There is no doubt but that if he had been a younger man when the new technical methods made their appearance, he would have adopted them and their results in his volumes.  One of the first great pieces of work which utilised methods more like those now used in all laboratories than those employed during the greater part of Huxley’s life as a teacher was the classical investigation by Van Beneden into the changes in the egg of Ascaris which accompany the process of fertilisation.  When Huxley read the memoir he exclaimed, “All this by the use of glacial acetic acid—­is it possible!” At once, Professor Howes relates, he repeated the whole investigation himself, and, when satisfied, declared that the “history of the histological investigation of the future would be the history of its methods.”  Not only have the chemical substances used in preparing tissues for examination greatly increased since Huxley’s time as an active worker, but a very important method of investigation has come into general use.  In Huxley’s time tissues or animals too large or too opaque to be examined microscopically as whole structures were either teased by needles or were cut with a razor by hand into comparatively thick slices.  The process of cutting, however practised the operator, was tedious and uncertain, and it was almost impossible to cut a piece of tissue into a series of thin slices without losing or destroying considerable portions.  Microtomes, with various accessory mechanical appliances, have now been invented, and by means of these not only are slices of great tenuity made with ease, but there is little difficulty in cutting the most delicate organism into a ribbon of consecutive slices.  Such new methods have made almost a revolution in the study of zooelogy, particularly of the lower forms of life and of the embryonic stages of higher animals, and books written before these methods became common have naturally been superseded.

Huxley did far more for the teaching of science than the preparation of books, however useful these were.  He was the practical inventor of the laboratory system of teaching zooelogical science, and all over the world the methods invented by him have been adopted in university laboratories and technical schools.  He had always declared that since zooelogy was a physical science, the method of studying it must needs be analogous to that which is followed in other physical sciences.  If a man wishes to be a chemist, it is necessary not only that he should read chemical books and attend