The regular lectures, fifty-seven in number, ran from February to April and from April to June, with fortnightly examinations during the latter period, six in number.  I take the scheme from his notebook:—­] “After prolegomena, the physiology and morphology of lobster and dove; then through Invertebrates, Anodon, Actinia, and Vorticella Protozoa, to Molluscan types.  Insects, then Vertebrates.  Supplemented Paleontologically by the demonstrations of the selected types in the cases; twelve Paleozoic, twelve Mesozoic and Cainozoic,” [by his assistants.] “To make the course complete there should be added

1.  A series of lectures on Species, practical discrimination and description, modification by conditions and distribution;

2.  Lectures on the elements of Botany and Fossil Plants.”

[This reorganisation of his course went hand in hand with his utilisation of the Jermyn Street Museum for paleontological teaching, and all through 1857 he was busily working at the Explanatory Catalogue.

Moreover, in 1855 he had begun at Jermyn Street his regular courses of lectures to working men—­lectures which impressed those qualified to judge as surpassing even his class lectures.  Year after year he gave the artisans of his best, on the principle enunciated thus early in a letter of February 27, 1855, to 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.  You will be with me, I know.

[And again on May 6, 1855:—­]

I am glad your lectures went off so well.  They were better attended than mine [the Preliminary Course], although in point of earnestness and attention my audience was all I could wish.  I am now giving a course of the same kind to working men exclusively—­one of what we call our series of “working men’s lectures,” consisting 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.

[The corresponding movement set going by F.D.  Maurice also claimed his interest, and in 1857 he gave his first address at the Working Men’s College to an audience, as he notes, of some fifty persons, including Maurice himself.

Other work of importance was connected with the Royal Institution.  He had been elected to deliver the triennial course as Fullerian Professor, and for his subject in 1856-57 chose Physiology and Comparative Anatomy; in 1858, the Principles of Biology.