chemical lectures, but that he should actually perform the fundamental experiments in the laboratory for himself, and thus learn exactly what the words which he reads in his books and hears from his teachers, mean.  “If you want a man to be a tea-merchant, you don’t tell him to read books about China or about tea, but you put him into a tea-merchant’s office where he has the handling, the smelling, and the tasting of tea.  Without the sort of knowledge which can be gained only in this practical way, his exploits as a tea-merchant will soon come to a bankrupt termination.”  The great and obvious difficulty in the practical teaching of biology appeared to be the immense number of different kinds of animals and plants in existence.  A human life would not suffice for the examination of a hundredth part of these.  Huxley met the difficulty by the “type” system.

“There are certainly more than 100,000 species of insects, and yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen one, will be able to have a fair conception of the structure of the whole.  I do not mean to say he will know that structure thoroughly, or as well as is desirable that he should know it; but he will have enough real knowledge to enable him to understand what he reads, to have genuine images in his mind of these structures which become so variously modified in all the forms of insects he has not seen.  In fact, there are such things as types of form among animals and vegetables, and for the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what constitutes the leading modifications of animal and plant life, it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small number of animals and plants.”

The type system in itself was not absolutely new.  Rolleston, the Linacre professor at Oxford, in his Forms of Animal Life had devised the method of teaching comparative anatomy by the study of a graded series of animals.  But his method depended on the existence of a series of dissections and preparations made by a skilled craftsman; the tradition of teaching by authority instead of by investigation was maintained, although the authority of books and lectures was aided by museum specimens in glass bottles, the actual basis of the book being a series of dissections prepared by Mr. Charles Robertson, Rolleston’s laboratory assistant, for the great International Exhibition of 1861.  The authorities of Huxley’s students were to be found in nature itself.  The green scum from the nearest gutter, a handful of weed from a pond, a bean-plant, some fresh-water mud, a frog, and a pigeon were the ultimate authorities of his course.  His students were taught how to observe them, and how to draw and record their observations.  However familiar the objects, each student had to verify every fact afresh for himself.  The business of the teacher was explanation of the methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of verification.  It was a training in the immemorial attitude of the scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an integral part in national education.