The other is “Science and Culture” ("Collected Essays” 3 134), which was delivered on October 1, as the opening address of the Josiah Mason College at Birmingham, and gave its name to a volume of essays published in the following year.  Here was a great school founded by a successful manufacturer, which was designed to give an education at once practical and liberal, such as the experience of its founder approved, to young men who meant to embark upon practical life.  A “mere” literary training—­i.e. in the classical languages—­was excluded, but not so the study of English literature and modern languages.  The greatest stress was laid on training in the scientific theory and practice on which depend the future of the great manufactures of the north.

The question dealt with in this address is whether such an education can give the culture demanded of an educated man to-day.  The answer is emphatically Yes.  English literature is a field of culture second to none, and for solely literary purposes, a thorough knowledge of it, backed by some other modern language, will amply suffice.  Combined with this, a knowledge of modern science, its principles and results, which have so profoundly modified society and have created modern civilisation, will give a “criticism of life,” as Matthew Arnold defined “the end and aim of all literature,” that is to say culture, unattainable by any form of education which neglects it.  In short, although the “culture” of former periods might be purely literary, that of to-day must be based, to a great extent, upon natural science.

This autumn several letters passed between him and Darwin.  The latter, contrary to his usual custom, wrote a letter to “Nature,” in reply to an unfair attack which had been made upon evolution by Sir Wyville Thomson in his Introduction to “The Voyage of the Challenger” (see Darwin “Life and Letters” 3 242), and asked Huxley to look over the concluding sentences of the letter, and to decide whether they should go with the rest to the printer or not.  “My request,” he writes (November 5), “will not cost you much trouble—­i.e. to read two pages—­for I know that you can decide at once.”  Huxley struck them out, replying on the 14th,] “Your pinned-on paragraph was so good that, if I had written it myself, I should have been unable to refrain from sending it on to the printer.  But it is much easier to be virtuous on other people’s account; and though Thomson deserved it and more, I thought it would be better to refrain.  If I say a savage thing, it is only ‘Pretty Fanny’s way’; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.”

[The rest of this correspondence has to do with a plan of Darwin’s, generous as ever, to obtain a Civil List pension for the veteran naturalist, Wallace, whose magnificent work for science had brought him but little material return.  He wrote to consult Huxley as to what steps had best be taken; the latter replied in the letter of November 14:—­]