[And his suggestions about buildings was at once adopted by the Committee, namely, that they should be erected at a future date, regard being had primarily rather to what is wanted in the inside than what will look well from the outside.

Now the Guilds formed a very proper body to set such a scheme on foot, because only such wealthy and influential members of the first mercantile city in the world could afford to let themselves be despised and jeered at for professing to teach English manufacturers and English merchants that they needed to be taught; and to spend 25,000 pounds a year towards that end for some time without apparent result.

That they eventually succeeded, is due no little to the careful plans drawn out by Huxley.  He may be described as “really the engineer of the City and Guilds Institute; for without his advice,” declared one of the leading members, “we should not have known what to have done.”

At the same time he warned them against indiscriminate zeal;] “though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that over-instruction may be worse.” [The aim of the Livery Companies should specially be to aid the practical teaching of science, so that at bottom the question turns mainly on the supply of teachers.

On December 11, 1879, he found a further opportunity of urging the cause of Technical Education.  A lecture on Apprenticeships was delivered before the Society of Arts by Professor Silvanus Thompson.  Speaking after the lecturer (see report in “Nature” 1879 page 139) he discussed the necessity of supplying the place of the old apprenticeships by educating children in the principles of their particular crafts, beyond the time when they were forced to enter the workshops.  This could be done by establishing schools in each centre of industry, connected with a central institution, such as was to be found in Paris or Zurich.  As for complaints of deficient teaching of handicrafts in the Board Schools, it was more important for them to make intelligent men than skilled workmen, as again was indicated in the French system.

As President of the Royal Society, he was on the above-mentioned Committee of the Guilds from 1883 to 1885, and on December 10, 1883, distributed the prizes in connection with the institution in the Clothworkers’ Hall.  After sketching the inception of the whole scheme, he referred to the Central Institute, then in course of building (begun in 1882, it was finished in 1884; the Technical College, Finsbury, was older by a year), and spoke of the difficulties in the way of organising such an institution:—­]

That building is simply the body, not the flesh and bones, but the bricks and stones, of the Central Institute, and the business upon which Sir F. Bramwell and my other colleagues on the Committee have been so much occupied, is the making a soul for this body; and I can assure you making a soul for anything is an amazingly difficult operation.  You are always in danger of doing as the man in the story of Frankenstein did, and making something which will eventually devour you instead of being useful to you.