As Professor (writes the late Professor Jeffery Parker), Huxley’s rule was characterised by what is undoubtedly the best policy for the head of a department.  To a new subordinate, “The General,” as he was always called, was rather stern and exacting, but when once he was convinced that his man was to be trusted, he practically let him take his own course; never interfered in matters of detail, accepted suggestions with the greatest courtesy and good humour, and was always ready with a kindly and humorous word of encouragement in times of difficulty.  I was once grumbling to him about how hard it was to carry on the work of the laboratory through a long series of November fogs, “when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared.”] “Never mind, Parker,” [he said, instantly capping my quotation], “cast four anchors out of the stern and wish for day.”

[Nothing, indeed, better illustrates this willingness to listen to suggested improvements than the inversion of the order of studies in the biological course which he inaugurated in 1872, namely, the substitution of the anatomy of a vertebrate for the microscopic examination of a unicellular organism as the opening study.  This was entirely Parker’s doing.  “As one privileged at the time to play a minor part,” writes Professor Howes ("Nature” January 6, 1898 page 228), “I well recall the determination in Parker’s mind that the change was desirable, and in Huxley’s, that it was not.  Again and again did Parker appeal in vain, until at last, on the morning of October 2, 1878, he triumphed.”

On his students he made a deep and lasting impression.

His lectures (writes Jeffery Parker) were like his writings, luminously clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge.  As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing as to win a battle.  He was an admirable draughtsman, and his blackboard illustrations were always a great feature of his lectures, especially when, to show the relation of two animal types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and smudges, evolve the one into the other before our eyes.  He seemed to have a real affection for some of the specimens illustrating his lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving manner; when he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes throw his arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him and take its hand, as if its silent companionship were an inspiration.  To me his lectures before his small class at Jermyn Street or South Kensington were almost more impressive than the discourses at the Royal Institution, where for an hour and a half he poured forth a stream of dignified, earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without the assistance of a note.