Riverside Literature Series 
 
 HUXLEY 
 Autobiography 
 
 elected Essays 
 
 Houghton Mifflin Co.
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
 
 Cl)c KitirrstDf ^Literature fer nr s 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND 
 SELECTED ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
 BY 
 
 ADA L. F. SNELL 
 
 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE 
 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 
 
 bc tfmersi&c press Cambridge
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE iii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Life of Huxley iv 
 
 Subject-matter, Structure, and Style of Essays . . xviii 
 Suggested Studies ........ xxi 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1 
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 15 
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 35 
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 44 
 
 THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION . . . .73 
 THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION ... 85 
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFK 95 
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 115 
 
 NOTES . i 
 
 This edition is published by permission of and special 
 arrangement with Messrs. D. Appleton and Company, the 
 authorized publishers of Huxley's Works. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 1101 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE purpose of the following selections is to present to 
 students of English a few of Huxley's representative es- 
 says. Some of these selections are complete ; others are 
 extracts. In the latter case, however, they are not extracts 
 in the sense of being incomplete wholes, for each selection 
 given will be found to have, in Aristotle's phrase, " a 
 beginning, a middle, and an end." That they are complete 
 in themselves, although only parts of whole essays, is due 
 to the fact that Huxley, in order to make succeeding ma- 
 terial clear, often prepares the way with a long and careful 
 definition. Such is the nature of the extract A Liberal 
 Education, in reality a definition to make distinct and 
 forcible his ideas on the shortcomings of English schools. 
 Such a definition, also, is The Method of Scientific In- 
 vestigation. 
 
 The footnotes are those of the author. Other notes on 
 the text have been included for the benefit of schools in- 
 adequately equipped with reference books. It is hoped, 
 however, that the notes may be found not to be so numer- 
 ous as to prevent the training of the student in a self-reliant 
 and scholarly use of dictionaries and reference books ; it 
 is hoped, also, that they may serve to stimulate him to 
 trace out for himself more completely any subject connected 
 with the text in which he may feel a peculiar interest. It 
 should be recognized that notes are of value only as they 
 develop power to read intelligently. If unintelligently relied 
 upon, they may even foster indifference and lazy mental 
 habits. 
 
 I wish to express my obligation to Miss Flora Bridges, 
 whose careful reading of the manuscript has been most 
 helpful, and to Professor Clara F. Stevens, the head of the 
 English Department at Mount Holyoke College, whose very 
 practical aid made this volume possible. 
 
 A. L. F. S.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I 
 
 THE LIFE OF HUXLEY 
 
 OF Huxley's life and of the forces which moulded his 
 thought, the Autobiography gives some account ; but many 
 facts which are significant are slighted, and necessarily the 
 later events of his life are omitted. To supplement the story 
 as given by him is the purpose of this sketch. The facts 
 for this account are gathered entirely from the Life and 
 Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son. For a real 
 acquaintance with Huxley, the student should consult this 
 source for himself ; he will count the reading of the Life 
 and Letters among the rare pleasures which have come to 
 him through books. 
 
 Thomas Henry Huxley was born on May 4, 1825. His 
 autobiography gives a full account of his parents, his early 
 Early boyhood, and his education. Of formal education, 
 
 education. Huxley had little ; but he had the richer school- 
 ing which nature and life give an eager mind. He read 
 widely ; he talked often with older people ; he was always 
 investigating the why of things. He kept a journal in 
 which he noted thoughts gathered from books, and ideas 
 on the causes of certain phenomena. In this journal he 
 frequently wrote what he had done and had set himself to 
 do in the way of increasing his knowledge. Self-conducted, 
 also, was his later education at the Charing Cross Hospital. 
 Here, like Stevenson in his university days, Huxley seemed 
 to be idle, but in reality, he was always busy on his own 
 private end. So constantly did he work over the microscope 
 that the window at which he sat came to be dubbed by 
 his fellow students " The Sign of the Head and Micro- 
 scope." Moreover, in his regular courses at Charing Cross, 
 he seems to have done work sufficiently notable to be 
 recognized by several prizes and a gold medal.
 
 INTRODUCTION v 
 
 Of his life after the completion of his medical course, 
 of his search for work, of his appointment as assistant 
 surgeon on board the Rattlesnake, and of his search 
 scientific work during the four years' cruise, forwort 
 Huxley gives a vivid description in the autobiography. As 
 a result of his investigations on this voyage, he published 
 various essays which quickly secured for him a position in 
 the scientific world as a naturalist of the first rank. A 
 testimony of the value of this work was his election to 
 membership in the Royal Society. 
 
 Although Huxley had now, at the age of twenty-six, 
 won distinction in science, he soon discovered that it was 
 not so easy to earn bread thereby. Nevertheless, to earn 
 a living was most important if he were to accomplish the 
 two objects which he had in view. He wished, in the first 
 place, to marry Miss Henrietta Heathorn of Sydney, to 
 whom he had become engaged when on the cruise with the 
 Rattlesnake ; his second object was to follow science as a 
 profession. The struggle to find something connected with 
 science which would pay was long and bitter ; and only 
 a resolute determination to win kept Huxley from aban- 
 doning it altogether. Uniform ill-luck met him everywhere. 
 He has told in his autobiography of his troubles with the 
 Admiralty in the endeavor to get his papers published, 
 and of his failure there. He applied for a position to teach 
 science in Toronto ; being unsuccessful in this attempt, 
 he applied successively for various professorships in the 
 United Kingdom, and in this he was likewise unsuccessful. 
 Some of his friends urged him to hold out, but others 
 thought the fight an unequal one, and advised him to emi- 
 grate to Australia. He himself was tempted to practice 
 medicine in Sydney ; but to give up his purpose seemed to 
 him like cowardice. On the other hand, to prolong the 
 struggle indefinitely when he might quickly earn a living 
 in other ways seemed like selfishness and an injustice to 
 the woman to whom he had been for a long time engaged. 
 Miss Heathorn, however, upheld him in his determination 
 to pursue science ; and his sister also, he writes, cheered him 
 by her advice and encouragement to persist in the struggle.
 
 vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 Something of the man's heroic temper may be gathered 
 from a letter which he wrote to Miss Heathorn when his 
 affairs were darkest. " However painful our separation 
 may be," he says, " the spectacle of a man who had given 
 up the cherished purpose of his life . . . would, before 
 long years were over our heads, be infinitely more painful." 
 He declares that he is hemmed in by all sorts of difficul- 
 ties. " Nevertheless the path has shown itself a fair one, 
 neither more difficult nor less so than most paths in life in 
 which a man of energy may hope to do much if he believes 
 in himself, and is at peace within." Thus relieved in mind, 
 he makes his decision in spite of adverse fate. " My course 
 of life is taken, I will not leave London I will make 
 myself a name and a position as well as an income by some 
 kind of pursuit connected with science which is the thing 
 for which Nature has fitted me if she has ever fitted any 
 one for anything." 
 
 But suddenly the long wait, the faith in self, were 
 justified, and the turning point came. "There is always 
 a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks 
 one's self on," he writes to his sister. "Thank God, I 
 think I may say I have weathered mine not without a 
 good deal of damage to spars and rigging though, for it 
 blew deuced hard on the other side." In 1854 a permament 
 Lecture- lectureship was offered him at the Government 
 sMps. School of Mines; also, a lectureship at St. 
 
 Thomas' Hospital ; and he was asked to give various other 
 lecture courses. He thus found himself able to establish 
 the home for which he had waited eight years. In July, 
 1855, he was married to Miss Heathorn. 
 
 The succeeding years from 1855 to 1860 were filled with 
 various kinds of work connected with science : original 
 investigation, printing of monographs, and establishing of 
 natural history museums. His advice concerning local mu- 
 seums is interesting and characteristically expressed. "It 
 [the local museum if properly arranged] will tell both na- 
 tives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and 
 possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas 
 the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand,
 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 Hindu idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and 
 conch shells who shall describe the weary inutility of 
 it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the 
 unwary to look for objects of science elsewhere than under 
 their noses. What they want to know is that their ' Amer- 
 ica is here,' as Wilhelm Meister has it." During this 
 period, also, he began his lectures to workingmen, calling 
 them Peoples' Lectures. "Popular lectures," he said, "I 
 hold to be an abomination unto the Lord." Working- 
 men attended these lectures in great numbers, and to them 
 Huxley seemed to be always able to speak at his best. His 
 purpose in giving these lectures should be expressed in his 
 own words : " I want the working class to understand that 
 Science and her ways are great facts for them that phys- 
 ical 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 and white ties tell them so, but because there are 
 plain and patent laws which they must obey ' under pen- 
 alties.' " 
 
 Toward the close of 1859, Darwin's Origin of Species " 
 was published. It raised a great outcry in England ; and 
 Huxley immediately came forward as chief de- Attitnfle 
 fender of the faith therein set forth. He took toward 
 part in debates on this subject, the most famous evolutiolL 
 of which was the one between himself and Bishop Wilber- 
 force at Oxford. The Bishop concluded his speech by 
 turning to Huxley and asking, " Was it through his grand- 
 father or grandmother that he claimed descent from a 
 monkey?" Huxley, as is reported by an eye-witness, 
 " slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern 
 and pale, very quiet and grave, he stood before us and 
 spoke those tremendous words. . . . He was not ashamed 
 to have a monkey for an ancestor ; but he would be ashamed 
 to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure 
 the truth." Another story indicates the temper of that 
 time. Carlyle, whose writing had strongly influenced Hux- 
 ley, and whom Huxley had come to know, could not for- 
 give him for his attitude toward evolution. One day, years 
 after the publication of Man's Place in Nature, Huxley,
 
 viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 seeing Carlyle on the other side of the street, a broken, 
 pathetic figure, walked over and spoke to him. The old 
 man merely remarked, " You 're Huxley, are n't you ? the 
 man that says we are all descended from monkeys," and 
 passed on. Huxley, however, saw nothing degrading to 
 man's dignity in the theory of evolution. In a wonderfully 
 fine sentence he gives his own estimate of the theory as it 
 affects man's future on earth. " Thoughtful men once es- 
 caped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudices, 
 will find in the lowly stock whence man has sprung the 
 best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will 
 discover, in his long progress through the past, a reasonable 
 ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." As 
 a result of all these controversies on The Origin of Species 
 and of investigations to uphold Darwin's theory, Huxley 
 wrote his first book, already mentioned, Man's Place in 
 Nature. 
 
 To read a list of the various kinds of work which Hux- 
 ley was doing from 1870 to 1875 is to be convinced of his 
 Establiali. abundant energy and many interests. At about 
 xnent oi this time Huxley executed the plan which he 
 toriM. had had in mind for a long time, the establish- 
 
 ment of laboratories for the use of students. His object 
 was to furnish a more exact preliminary training. He com- 
 plains that the student who enters the medical school is 
 ' ' so habituated to learn only from books, or oral teaching, 
 that the attempt to learn from things and to get his know- 
 ledge at first hand is something new and strange." To 
 make this method of teaching successful in the schools, 
 Huxley gave practical instruction in laboratory work to 
 school-masters. 
 
 " If I am to be remembered at all," Huxley once wrote, 
 " I would rather it should be as a man who did his best 
 to help the people than by any other title." Certainly as 
 much of his time as could be spared from his regular work 
 was given to help others. His lectures to workingmen 
 and school-masters have already been mentioned. In addi- 
 tion, he lectured to women on physiology and to children 
 on elementary science. In order to be of greater service to
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 the children, Huxley, in spite of delicate health, became a 
 member of the London School Board. His immediate ob- 
 ject was " to temper book-learning with something Servlce to 
 of the direct knowledge of Nature." His other pur- women and 
 poses were to secure a better physical training for 
 children and to give them a clearer understanding of social 
 and moral law. He did not believe, on the one hand, in 
 overcrowding the curriculum, but, on the other hand, he 
 " felt that all education should be thrown open to all that 
 each man might know to what state in life he was called " 
 Another statement of his purpose and beliefs is given by 
 Professor Gladstone, who says of his work on the board : 
 " He resented the idea that schools were to train either 
 congregations for churches or hands for factories. He was 
 on the Board as a friend of children. What he sought to 
 do for the child was for the child's sake, that it might live 
 a fuller, truer, worthier life." 
 
 The immense amount of work which Huxley did in 
 these years told very seriously on his naturally weak con- 
 stitution. It became necessary for him finally vacations 
 for two successive years to stop work altogether. ateoad - 
 In 1872 he went to the Mediterranean and to Egypt. This 
 was a holiday full of interest for a man like Huxley who 
 looked upon the history of the world and man's place in 
 the world with a keen scientific mind. Added to this sci- 
 entific bent of mind, moreover, Huxley had a deep appre- 
 ciation for the picturesque in nature and life. Bits of de- 
 scription indicate his enjoyment in this vacation. He writes 
 of his entrance to the Mediterranean, "It was a lovely 
 morning, and nothing could be grander than Ape Hill on 
 one side and the Rock on the other, looking like great lions 
 or sphinxes on each side of a gateway." In Cairo, Huxley 
 found much to interest him in archaeology, geology, and 
 the every-day life of the streets. At the end of a month, he 
 writes that he is very well and very grateful to Old Nile 
 for all that he has done for him, not the least " for a whole 
 universe of new thoughts and pictures of life." The trip, 
 however, did no lasting good. In 1873 Huxley was again 
 very ill, but was under such heavy costs at this time that
 
 x INTRODUCTION 
 
 another vacation was impossible. At this moment, a criti- 
 cal one in his life, some of his close scientific friends placed 
 to his credit twenty-one hundred pounds to enable him to 
 take the much needed rest. Darwin wrote to Huxley con- 
 cerning the gift : " In doing this we are convinced that 
 we act for the public interest." He assured Huxley that 
 the friends who gave this felt toward him as a brother. 
 " I am sure that you will return this feeling and will 
 therefore be glad to give us the opportunity of aiding you 
 in some degree, as this will be a happiness to us to the 
 last day of our lives." The gift made it possible for Hux- 
 ley to take another long vacation, part of which was spent 
 with Sir Joseph Hooker, a noted English botanist, visiting 
 the volcanoes of Auvergne. After this trip he steadily 
 improved in health, with no other serious illness for ten 
 years. 
 
 In 1876 Huxley was invited to visit America and to 
 deliver the inaugural address at Johns Hopkins Univer- 
 Vislt to s ity- 1 J u ty f this year accordingly, in company 
 America. with his wife, he crossed to New York. Every- 
 where Huxley was received \nth enthusiasm, for his name 
 was a very familiar one. Two quotations from his address 
 at Johns Hopkins are especially worthy of attention as a 
 part of his message to Americans. "It has been my fate 
 to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks 
 and mortar in the petrifying springs of architecture, with 
 nothing left to work them. A great warrior is said to have 
 made a desert and called it peace. Trustees have sometimes 
 made a palace and called it a university." 
 
 The second quotation is as follows : 
 
 I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by 
 your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not 
 grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, 
 about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging 
 fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things ? . . . 
 
 The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral 
 worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Edu- 
 cation cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them 
 to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, 
 and the universities ought to be, and may be, the fortresses of 
 the higher life of the nation.
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 After the return from America, the same innumerable 
 occupations were continued. It would be impossible in 
 short space even to enumerate all Huxley's various publi- 
 cations of the next ten years. His work, however, A(tal ^i^ 
 changed gradually from scientific investigation tratlve 
 to administrative work, not the least important * 
 of which was the office of Inspector of Fisheries. A second 
 important office was the Presidency of the Royal Society. 
 Of the work of this society Sir Joseph Hooker writes : 
 "The duties of the office are manifold and heavy; they 
 include attendance at all the meetings of the Fellows, and 
 of the councils, committees, and sub-committees of the 
 Society, and especially the supervision of the printing and 
 illustrating all papers on biological subjects that are pub- 
 lished in the Society's Transactions and Proceedings ; the 
 latter often involving a protracted correspondence with the 
 authors. To this muot be added a share in the supervision, 
 of the staff officers, of the library and correspondence, and 
 the details of house-keeping." All the work connected with 
 this and many other offices bespeaks a life too hard-driven 
 and accounts fully for the continued ill-health which 
 finally resulted in a complete break-down. 
 
 Huxley had always advocated that the age of sixty was 
 the time for "official death," and had looked forward to a 
 peaceful " Indian summer.'" With this object pms^t 
 in mind and troubled by increasing ill-health, he * health, 
 began in 1885 to give up his work. But to live even in 
 comparative idleness, after so many years of activity, was 
 difficult. <f I am sure," he says, " that the habit of incessant 
 work into which we all drift is as bad in its way as 
 dram-drinking. In time you cannot be comfortable without 
 stimulus." But continued bodily weakness told upon him to 
 the extent that all work became distasteful. An utter weari- 
 ness with frequent spells of the blues took possession of 
 him ; and the story of his life for some years is the story 
 of the long pursuit of health in England, Switzerland, and 
 especially in Italy. 
 
 Although Huxley was wretchedly ill during this period, 
 he wrote letters which are good to read for their humor
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 and for their pictures of foreign cities. Rome he writes of 
 as an idle, afternoony sort of place from which it is diffi- 
 cult to depart. He worked as eagerly over the historic 
 remains in Rome as he would over a collection of geological 
 specimens. " I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well 
 and I am quite learned in the Catacombs, which suit me, 
 as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can recon- 
 struct the body of the primitive Church." Florence, for a 
 man with a conscience and ill-health, had too many picture 
 galleries. ' ' They are a sore burden to the conscience if you 
 don't go to see them, and an awful trial to the back and 
 legs if you do," he complained. He found Florence, never- 
 theless, a lovely place and full of most interesting things 
 to see and do. His letters with reference to himself also 
 are vigorously and entertainingly expressed. He writes in 
 a characteristic way of his growing difficulty with his hear- 
 ing. " It irritates me not to hear ; it irritates me still more 
 to be spoken to as if I were deaf, and the absurdity of being 
 irritated on the last ground irritates me still more." And 
 again he writes in a more hopeful strain, " With fresh air 
 and exercise an_l careful avoidance of cold and night air I 
 am to be all right again." He then adds : " I am not fond 
 of coddling ; but as Paddy gave his pig the best corner in 
 his cabin because 'shure, he paid the rint' I feel 
 bound to take care of myself as a household animal of 
 value, to say nothing of other points." 
 
 Although he was never strong after this long illness, 
 Huxley began in 1889 to be much better. The first sign 
 Last f returning vigor was the eagerness with which 
 
 years. h e entered into a controversy with Gladstone. 
 
 Huxley had always enjoyed a mental battle ; and some of 
 his fiercest tilts were with Gladstone. He even found the 
 cause of better health in this controversy, and was grateful 
 to the " Grand Old Man " for making home happy for him. 
 From this time to his death, Huxley wrote a number of 
 articles on politics, science, and religion, many of which 
 were published in the volume called Controverted Ques- 
 tions. The main value of these essays lies in the fact that 
 Huxley calls upon men to give clear reasons for the faith
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 which they claim as theirs, and makes, as a friend wrote 
 of him, hazy thinking and slovenly, half-formed conclu- 
 sions seem the base thing they really are. 
 
 The last years of Huxley's life were indeed the longed- 
 for Indian summer. Away from the noise of London at 
 Eastbourne by the sea, he spent many happy hours with 
 old-time friends and in his garden, which was a great joy 
 to him. His large family of sons and daughters and grand- 
 children brought much cheer to his last days. Almost to 
 the end he was working and writing for publication. Three 
 days before his death he wrote to his old friend, Hooker, 
 that he did n't feel at all like " sending in his checks " and 
 hoped to recover. He died very quietly on June 29, 1895. 
 That he met death with the same calm faith and strength 
 with which he had met life is indicated by the lines which 
 his wife wrote and which he requested to be his epitaph : 
 
 Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep ; 
 For still He giveth His beloved sleep, 
 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best. 
 
 To attempt an analysis of Huxley's character, unique 
 and bafflingly complex as it is, is beyond the scope of this 
 sketch ; but to give only the mere facts of his life is to do 
 an injustice to the vivid personality of the man as it is 
 revealed in his letters. All his human interest _ , 
 in people and things pets, and flowers, and " 
 
 family brightens many pages of the two pon- 
 derous volumes. Now one reads of his grief over some 
 backward-going plant, or over some garden tragedy, as " A 
 lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in 
 nailing up, has just died suddenly. I am more inconsolable 
 than Jonah ! " Now one is amused with a nonsense letter 
 to one of his children, and again with an account of a pet. 
 
 "I wish you would write seriously to M . She is not 
 
 behaving well to Oliver. I have seen handsomer kittens, 
 but few more lively, and energetically destructive. Just 
 
 now he scratched away at something M says cost 13s. 
 
 6d. a yard and reduced more or less of it to combings.
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 M therefore excludes him from the dining-room and 
 
 all those opportunities of higher education which he would 
 have in my house." Frequently one finds a description of 
 some event, so vividly done that the mere reading of it 
 seems like a real experience. An account of Tennyson's 
 burial in Westminster is a typical bit of description: 
 
 Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, 
 while the choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light 
 illuminated the flower-covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one 
 thought of the bright succession of his works 'between the dark- 
 ness before and the darkness after. I am glad to say that the 
 Royal Society was represented by four of its chief officers, and 
 nine of the commonalty, including myself. Tennyson has a right 
 to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the 
 drift of science. 
 
 No parts of the Life and Letters are more enjoyable 
 than those concerning the " Happy Family," as a friend 
 Family f Huxley's names his household. His family of 
 Uie< seven children found their father a most engag- 
 
 ing friend and companion. He could tell them wonderful 
 sea stories and animal stories and could draw fascinating 
 pictures. His son writes of how when he was ill with scarlet 
 fever he used to look forward to his father's home-com- 
 ing. " The solitary days for I was the first victim in 
 the family were very long, and I looked forward with 
 intense interest to one half-hour after dinner, when he 
 would come up and draw scenes from the history of a re- 
 markable bull-terrier and his family that went to the sea- 
 side in a most human and child-delighting manner. I have 
 seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one 
 evening, I fell asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and 
 lost it out of my life." 
 
 The account of the comradeship between Huxley and 
 his wife reads like a good old-time romance. He was at- 
 tracted to her at first by her ''simplicity and directness 
 united with an unusual degree of cultivation," Huxley's 
 son writes. On her he depended for advice in his work, 
 and for companionship at home and abroad when wander- 
 ing in search of health in Italy and Switzerland. When 
 he had been separated from her for some time, he wrote,
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 "Nobody, children or anyone else, can be to me what you 
 are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and 
 this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that 
 as in other things." Again he writes, " Against all trouble 
 (and I have had my share) I weigh a wife-comrade ' trew 
 and fest' in all emergencies." 
 
 The letters also give one a clear idea of the breadth of 
 Huxley's interests, particularly of his appreciation of the 
 various forms of art. Huxley believed strongly 
 in the arts as a refining and helpful influence in tionof 
 education. He keenly enjoyed good music. Pro- 
 fessor Hewes writes of him that one breaking in upon him 
 in the afternoon at South Kensington would not infre- 
 quently be met "with a snatch of some melody of Bach's 
 fugue." He also liked good pictures, and always had among 
 his friends well-known artists, as Alma-Tadema, Sir Fred- 
 erick Leighton, and Burne-Jones. He read poetry widely, 
 and strongly advocated the teaching of poetry in English 
 schools. As to poetry, his own preferences are interesting. 
 Wordsworth he considered too discursive; Shelley was too 
 diffuse ; Keats, he liked for pure beauty, Browning for 
 strength, and Tennyson for his understanding of modern 
 science; but most frequently of all he read Milton and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 As to Huxley's appearance, and as to the impression 
 which his personality made upon others, the description 
 of a friend, Mr. G. W. Smalley, presents him 
 with striking force. " The square forehead, the * 
 square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing 
 dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength 
 he gave you, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of 
 immovability, yet with the gentleness arising from the 
 serene consciousness of his strength all this belonged to 
 Huxley and to him alone. The first glance magnetized his 
 audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to com- 
 mand, of one having authority, and not fearing on occasion 
 to use it. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad 
 forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did 
 not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 in everything look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, 
 sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or orator- 
 ical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art 
 of all, whether in oratory or whatever else he had sim- 
 plicity." 
 
 Simplicity, directness, sincerity, all these qualities 
 describe Huxley; but the one attribute which distinguishes 
 Dlstin ki m above all others is love of truth. A love ol 
 
 guishing truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, would 
 attributes. necessar j}y produce a scholarly habit of mind. 
 It was the zealous search for truth which determined his 
 method of work. In science, Huxley would " take at sec- 
 ond hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching." Some 
 one reproached him for wasting time verifying what another 
 had already done. " If that is his practice," he commented, 
 "his work will never live." The same motive made him 
 a master of languages. To be able to read at first hand the 
 writings of other nations, he learned German, French, 
 Italian, and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning 
 to read Greek was to see for himself if Aristotle really 
 did say that the heart had only three chambers an error, 
 he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the translator. It 
 was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him im- 
 patient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own 
 work has all the breadth and freedom and universality of 
 the scholar, but it has, also, a quality equally distinctive 
 of the scholar, namely, an infinite precision in the matter 
 of detail. 
 
 If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, 
 also, a courageous fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it, 
 A coura- was to see ^ ^ e truth ; his second was to teach 
 geous it to others, and, if necessary, to contend valiantly 
 
 g ter> for it. To fail to teach what you honestly know 
 to be true, because it may harm your reputation, or even 
 because it may give pain to others, is cowardice. "I am 
 not greatly concerned about any reputation," Huxley writes 
 to his wife, " except that of being entirely honest and 
 straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publica- 
 tion of Man's Place in Nature would ruin his career,
 
 INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 Huxley passed on to others what nature had revealed to 
 him. He was regardless, also, of the confusion and pain 
 which his view would necessarily bring to those who had 
 been nourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or 
 two and to do battle with the world on the score of its old 
 beliefs, has never been an easy task since the world began. 
 Certainly it required fearlessness and determination to 
 wrestle with the prejudices against science in the middle 
 of the nineteenth century how much may be gathered 
 from the reading of Darwin's Life and Letters. The atti- 
 tude of the times toward science has already been indicated. 
 One may be allowed to give one more example from the 
 reported address of a clergyman. " ye men of science, ye 
 men of science, leave us our ancestors in paradise, and you 
 may have yours in Zoological gardens." The war was, for 
 the most part, between the clergy and the men of science, 
 but it is necessary to remember that Huxley fought not 
 against Christianity, but against dogma ; that he fought not 
 against the past, he had great reverence for the accom- 
 plishment of the past, but against unwillingness to accept 
 the new truth of the present. 
 
 A scholar of the highest type and a fearless defender of 
 true and honest thinking, Huxley certainly was: but the 
 quality which gives meaning to his work, which A scholar 
 makes it live, is a certain human quality due to 
 the fact that Huxley was always keenly alive to 
 the relation of science to the problems of life. For this 
 reason, he was not content with the mere acquirement of 
 knowledge ; and for this reason, also, he could not quietly 
 wait until the world should come to his way of thinking. 
 Much of the time, therefore, which he would otherwise 
 naturally have spent in research, he spent in contending 
 for and in endeavoring to popularize the facts of science. 
 It was this desire to make his ideas prevail that led Hux- 
 ley to work for a mastery of the technique of speaking and 
 writing. He hated both, but -taught himself to do both 
 well. The end of all his infinite pains about his writing 
 was not because style for its own sake is worth while, but 
 because he saw that the only way to win men to a consid-
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 eration of his message was to make it perfectly clear and 
 attractive to them. Huxley's message to the people was 
 that happiness, usefulness, and even material prosperity 
 depend upon an understanding of the laws of nature. He 
 also taught that a knowledge of the facts of science is the 
 soundest basis for moral law ; that a clear sense of the pen- 
 alties which ^Nature inflicts for disobedience of her laws 
 must eventually be the greatest force for the purification 
 of life. If he was to be remembered, therefore, he desired 
 that he should be remembered primarily as one who had 
 helped the people " to think truly and to live rightly." 
 Huxley's writing is, then, something more than a scholarly 
 exposition of abstruse matter ; for it has been further de- 
 voted to the increasing of man's capacity for usefulness, 
 and to the betterment of his life here on earth. 
 
 II 
 
 SUBJECT-MATTER, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE 
 
 From the point of view of subject-matter, structure, 
 and style, Huxley's essays are admirably adapted to the uses 
 of the student in English. The themes of the essays are 
 two, education and science. In these two subjects 
 and Huxley earnestly sought to arouse interest and 
 
 science. ^ j m p ar ^ knowledge, because he believed that 
 intelligence in these matters is essential for the advance- 
 ment of the race in strength and morality. Both subjects, 
 therefore, should be valuable to the student. In education, 
 certainly, he should be interested, since it is his main occu- 
 pation) if not his chief concern. Essays like A Liberal Ed- 
 ucation and The Principal Subjects of Education may 
 suggest to him the meaning of all his work, and may sug- 
 gest, also, the things which it would be well for him to 
 know ; and, even more, a consideration of these subjects 
 may arouse him to a greater interest and responsibility than 
 he usually assumes toward his own mental equipment. Of 
 greater interest probably will be the subjects which deal 
 with nature ; for the ways of nature are more nearly within
 
 INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 the range of his real concerns than are the wherefores of 
 study. The story of the formation of a piece of chalk, the 
 suhstance which lies at the basis of all life, the habits of 
 sea animals, are all subjects the nature of which is akin to 
 his own eager interest in the world. 
 
 Undoubtedly the subjects about which Huxley writes 
 will " appeal " to the student ; but it is in analysis 
 that the real discipline lies. For analysis Huxley's essays 
 are excellent. They illustrate "the clear power of exposi- 
 tion," and such power is, as Huxley wrote to Tyndall, the 
 one quality the people want, exposition " so clear that 
 they may think they understand even if they don't." 
 Huxley obtains that perfect clearness in his own work by 
 simple definition, by keeping steadily before his Clearne 
 audience his intention, and by making plain by simple 
 throughout his lecture a well-defined organic d8flniti<m - 
 structure. No X-ray machine is needful to make the skel- 
 eton visible ; it stands forth with the parts all nicely related 
 and compactly joined. In reference to structure, his son and 
 biographer writes, " He loved to visualize his object clearly. 
 The framework of what he wished to say would always be 
 drawn out first." Professor Ray Lankester also mentions 
 Huxley's love of form. "He deals with form not only as 
 a mechanical engineer in partibus (Huxley's own descrip- 
 tion of himself), but also as an artist, a born lover of form, 
 a character which others recognize in him though he does 
 not himself set it down in his analysis." Huxley's own 
 account of his efforts to shape his work is suggestive. 
 " The fact is that I have a great love and respect for my 
 native tongue, and take great pains to use it properly. 
 Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can 
 get them into proper shape ; and I believe I become more 
 fastidious as I grow older." And, indeed, there is a marked 
 difference in firmness of structure between the earlier 
 essays, such as On the Educational Value of the Natural 
 History Sciences, written, as Huxley acknowledges, in 
 great haste, and the later essays, such as A Liberal Edu- 
 cation and The Method of Scientific Investigation. To 
 trace and to define this difference will be most helpful to
 
 xx INTRODUCTION 
 
 the student who is building up a knowledge of structure 
 for his own use. 
 
 According to Huxley's biographer in the Life and 
 Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, the essays which rep- 
 resent him at his best are those published in 1868. They 
 are A Piece of Chalk, A Liberal Education, and On the 
 Physical Basis of Life. In connection with the comment 
 on these essays is the following quotation which gives 
 one interesting information as to Huxley's method of ob- 
 taining a clear style : 
 
 This lecture on A Piece of Chalk together with two others de- 
 livered this year, seems to me to mark the maturing of his style 
 into that mastery of clear expression for which he deliberately 
 labored, the saying exactly what he meant, neither too much 
 nor too little, without confusion and without obscurity. Have 
 something to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's 
 theory of style ; Huxley's was to say that which has to be said 
 in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each 
 word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you 
 are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact sometime and 
 get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly 
 to use language which will give a loophole of escape either 
 way, there is no hope for you. 
 
 This was the secret of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's 
 aphorism on style find a better illustration, Le style c'est I'homme 
 meme. In him science and literature, too often divorced, were 
 closely united ; and literature owes him a debt for importing into 
 it so much of the highest scientific habit of mind ; for showing 
 that truthfulness need not be bald, and that real power lies more 
 in exact accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. 
 
 Huxley's own theory as to how clearness is to be ob- 
 tained gets at the root of the matter. " For my part, I 
 venture to doubt the wisdom of attempting to mould one's 
 style by any other process than that of striving after the 
 clear and forcible expression of definite conceptions ; in 
 which process the Glassian precept, first catch your de- 
 finite conception, is probably the most difficult to obey." 
 
 Perfect clearness, above every other quality of style, 
 certainly is characteristic of Huxley ; but clearness alone 
 does not make subject-matter literature. In ad- 
 quaiities dition to this quality, Huxley's writing wins the 
 reader by the racy diction, the homely illustra- 
 tion, the plain, honest phrasing. All these and other qual-
 
 INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 ities bring one into an intimate relationship with his 
 subject. A man of vast technical learning, he is still so 
 interested in the relation of his facts to the problems of 
 men that he is always able to infuse life into the driest of 
 subjects, in other words, to humanize his knowledge; and 
 in the estimation of Matthew Arnold, this is the true work 
 of the scholar, the highest mission of style. 
 
 Ill 
 
 SUGGESTED STUDIES IN SUBJECT-MATTER, STRUCTURE, 
 AND STYLE 
 
 Although fully realizing that the questions here given 
 are only such as are generally used everywhere by instruc- 
 tors in English, the editor has, nevertheless, included them 
 with the hope that some one may find them helpful. 
 
 The studies given include a few general questions and 
 suggestions on subject-matter, structure, and style. The 
 questions on structure are based on an anatysis of the whole 
 composition and of the paragraph ; those on style are based 
 on a study of sentences and words. Such a division of 
 material may seem unwarranted ; for, it may be urged, firm- 
 ness of structure depends, to a certain extent, upon sen- 
 tence-form and words ; and clearness of style, to a large 
 extent, upon the form of the paragraph and whole com- 
 position. The two, certainly, cannot be in justice separated ; 
 and especially is it true, more deeply true than the average 
 student can be brought to believe, that structure, " mind, in 
 style " as Pater phrases it, primarily determines not only 
 clearness, but also such qualities of style as reserve, refine- 
 ment, and simple Doric beauty. Since, however, structure is 
 more obviously associated with the larger groups, and style 
 with the smaller, the questions have been arranged accord- 
 ing to this division. 
 
 I. Suggestions for the Study of Subject-Matter. 
 
 1. To whom does Huxley address the essay? 
 
 2. Can you see any adaptation of his material to his audi- 
 
 ence?
 
 xxii INTRODUCTION 
 
 3. How would A Piece of Chalk be differently presented if 
 
 given before a science club? 
 
 4. Does Huxley make his subject interesting? If so, how 
 
 does he accomplish this? 
 
 5. Is the personality of Huxley suggested by the essays? See 
 Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 293. 
 
 II. Suggestions for the Study of Structure. 
 A.. Analysis of the whole composition. 
 
 1. State in one complete sentence the theme of the essay. 
 
 2. Analyze the essay for the logical development of the 
 
 thought. 
 
 a. Questions on the Introduction. 
 
 In the introduction, how does the author approach his 
 
 material? 
 
 Does he give the main points of the essay? 
 Does he give his reasons for writing? 
 Does he narrow his subject to one point of view? 
 Is the introduction a digression? 
 
 b. Questions on the Body. 
 
 Can you find large groups of thought? 
 
 Are these groups closely related to the theme and to 
 
 each other? 
 
 Do you find any digressions? 
 Is the method used in developing the groups inductive 
 
 or deductive? 
 
 Is the method different in different groups? 
 Are the groups arranged for good emphasis in the 
 
 whole composition? 
 
 c. Questions on the Conclusion. 
 
 How does the author conclude the essay? 
 
 Does the conclusion sum up the points of the essay? 
 
 Are any new points suggested? 
 
 Is the thought of the whole essay stated? 
 
 Do you consider it a strong conclusion? 
 
 3. Make out an outline which shall picture the skeleton of 
 
 the essay studied. In making the outline express the 
 topics in the form of complete statements, phrase the 
 thought for clear sequence, and be careful about such 
 matters as spacing and punctuation. 
 B. A nalysis of paragraph structure. 
 
 1. Can a paragraph be analyzed in the same manner as the 
 
 whole composition? 
 
 2. Can you express the thought of each paragraph in a com- 
 
 plete sentence? 
 
 3. Can you find different points presented in the paragraph 
 
 developing the paragraph topic, as the large groups of 
 the whole composition develop the theme? 
 
 4. Are the paragraphs closely related, and how are they 
 
 bound together? 
 
 5. Can any of the paragraphs be combined to advantage? 
 
 6. Read from Barrett Wendell's English Composition the
 
 INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 chapter on paragraphs. Are Huxley's paragraphs con- 
 structed in accordance with the principles given in this 
 chapter ? 
 7. Is the paragraph type varied? For paragraph types, see 
 
 Scott and Denny's Paragraph Writing. 
 C. Comparative study of the structure of the essay. 
 
 1. Do you find any difference between Huxley's earlier and 
 
 later essays as regards the structure of the whole, or 
 the structure of the paragraph? 
 
 2. Which essay seems to you to be most successful in struc- 
 
 ture? 
 
 3. Has the character of the audience any influence upon the 
 
 structure of the essays? 
 
 4. Compare the structure of one of Huxley's essays with that 
 
 of some other essay recently studied. 
 
 5. Has the nature of the material any influence upon the 
 
 structure of the essay? 
 III. Suggestions for the Study of Style. 
 
 A. Exactly what do you mean by style f 
 
 B. Questions on sentence structure. 
 
 1. From any given essay, group together sentences which 
 
 are long, short, loose, periodic, balanced, simple, com- 
 pound ; note those peculiar, for any reason, to Huxley. 
 
 2. Stevenson says, "The one rule is to be infinitely various; 
 
 to interest, to disappoint, to surprise and still to gratify ; 
 to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still 
 to give the effect of ingenious neatness." 
 
 Do Huxley's sentences conform to Stevenson's rule? 
 Compare Huxley's sentences with Stevenson's for va- 
 riety in form. Is there any reason for the difference 
 between the form of the two writers? 
 
 3. Does this quotation from Pater's essay on Style describe 
 
 Huxley's sentences? "The blithe, crisp sentence, deci- 
 sive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate 
 with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sen- 
 tence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single 
 word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look 
 closely, you can see contrivance, much adjustment, to 
 bring a highly qualified matter into compass at one 
 view." 
 
 4. How do Huxley's sentences compare with those of Ruskin, 
 
 or with those of any author recently studied? 
 
 5. Are Huxley's sentences musical? How does an author 
 make his sentences musical? 
 
 C. Questions on words. 
 
 1. Do you find evidence of exactness, a quality which 
 
 Huxley said he labored for? 
 
 2. Are the words general or specific in character? 
 
 3. How does Huxley make his subject-matter attractive? 
 
 4. From what sources does Huxley derive his words? Are 
 
 they every -day words, or more scholarly in character?
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 5. Do you find any figures? Are these mainly ornamental or 
 
 do they reenforce the thought? 
 
 6. Are there many allusions and quotations? Can you easily 
 
 recognize the source? 
 
 7. Pater says in his essay on Style that the literary artist 
 
 "begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his 
 own spirit, and in the strictest sense original." Do you 
 find that Huxley's vocabulary suggests the man? 
 
 8. Does Huxley seem to search for " the smooth, or win- 
 
 some, or forcible word, as such, or quite simply and 
 honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning"? 
 
 9. Make out a list of the words and proper names in any 
 
 given essay which are not familiar to you ; write out 
 the explanation of these in the form of notes giving 
 any information which is interesting and relevant. 
 D. General questions on style. 
 
 1. How is Huxley's style adapted to the subject-matter? 
 
 2. Can you explain the difference in style of the different 
 
 essays by the difference in purpose? 
 
 3. Compare Huxley's way of saying things with some other 
 
 author's way of saying things. 
 
 4. Huxley says of his essays to workingmen, " I only wish 
 
 I had had the sense to anticipate the run these have 
 had here and abroad, and I would have revised them 
 properly. As they stand they are terribly in the rough, 
 from a literary point of view." 
 Do you find evidences of roughness?
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . . which 
 I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being employed in 
 this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking in 
 all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less 
 than things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do. 
 Bishop Butler to the Duchess of Somerset. 
 
 THE " many things " to which the Duchess's corre- 
 spondent here refers are the repairs and improvements 
 of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great 
 apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity 
 of his character, would have considered the writing an 
 account of himself as a thing which could be put upon 
 him to do whatever circumstances might be taken in. 
 But the good bishop lived in an age when a man 
 might write books and yet be permitted to keep his 
 private existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian 
 epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay concealed 
 in the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades 
 our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth 
 of time. 
 
 At present, the most convinced believer in the aphor- 
 ism " Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," is not always able to 
 act up to it. An importunate person informs him that 
 his portrait is about to be published and will be ac- 
 companied by a biography which the importunate 
 person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what that
 
 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 means ; either he undertakes to revise the " biography " 
 or he does not. In the former case, he makes himself 
 responsible; in the latter, he allows the publication of 
 a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for which 
 he will be held responsible by those who are familiar 
 with the prevalent art of self-advertisement. On the 
 whole, it may be better to get over the " burlesque of 
 being employed in this manner " and do the thing him- 
 self. 
 
 It was by reflections of this kind that, some years 
 ago, I was led to write and permit the publication of 
 the subjoined sketch. 
 
 I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on 
 the 4th of May, 1825, at Baling, which was, at that 
 time, as quiet a little country village as could be found 
 within a half-a-dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. 
 Now it is a suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 
 inhabitants. My father was one of the masters in a 
 large semi-public school which at one time had a high 
 reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded 
 my arrival in this world, but, in my childhood, I re- 
 member hearing a traditional account of the manner 
 in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great 
 practical value. The windows of my mother's room 
 were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of 
 the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neigh- 
 bouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, 
 pitching on the window-sill, was making its way into 
 the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. 
 If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from 
 her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled 
 on my lips, and I should have been endowed with that 
 mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 
 
 more surely than worth, capacity, or honest work, 
 to the highest places in Church and State. But the op- 
 portunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content 
 myself through life with saying what I mean in the 
 plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, 
 there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects 
 of advancement. 
 
 Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not 
 know ; but it is a curious chance that my parents should 
 have fixed for my usual denomination upon the name 
 of that particular Apostle with whom I have always 
 felt most sympathy. Physically and mentally I am 
 the son of my mother so completely even down to 
 peculiar movements of the hands, which made their 
 appearance in me as I reached the age she had when 
 I noticed them that I can hardly find any trace of 
 my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for 
 drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never 
 been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of 
 tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers some- 
 times call obstinacy. 
 
 My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional 
 and energetic temperament, and possessed of the 
 most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's 
 head. With no more education than other women of 
 the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent 
 mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteris- 
 tic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured 
 to suggest she had not taken much time to arrive at any 
 conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it, things 
 flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on 
 to me in full strength ; it has often stood me in good 
 stead ; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it 
 has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time
 
 4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 were to come over again, there is nothing I would less 
 willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit. 
 
 I have next to nothing to say about my childhood. In 
 later years my mother, looking at me almost reproach- 
 fully, would sometimes say, " Ah ! you were such a 
 pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in concluding 
 that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter 
 of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of cer- 
 tain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that 
 I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, 
 Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and 
 who was as a god to us country folk, because he was 
 occasionally visited by the then Prince George of 
 Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong 
 side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and 
 preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as 
 nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday 
 morning when the rest of the family were at church. 
 That is the earliest indication I can call to mind of the 
 strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy 
 they have for the most part remained in a latent state. 
 
 My regular school training was of the briefest, per- 
 haps fortunately, for though my way of life has made 
 me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men, 
 from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm 
 that the society I fell into at school was the worst I 
 have ever known. We boys were average lads, with 
 much the same inherent capacity for good and evil 
 as any others; but the people who were set over us 
 cared about as much for our intellectual and moral 
 welfare as if they were baby-farmers. We were left 
 to the operation of the struggle for existence among 
 ourselves, and bullying was the least of the ill prac-
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 
 
 tices current among us. Almost the only cheerful rem- 
 iniscence in connection with the place which arises 
 in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my 
 classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand 
 it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a 
 wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up 
 for lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectu- 
 ally. However, one of my first experiences of the ex- 
 tremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as ex- 
 hibited by the course of things in general, arose out of 
 the fact that I the victor had a black eye, while 
 he the vanquished had none, so that I got into 
 disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and there- 
 after I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I 
 ever received in my life was to be told a dozen years 
 afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse 
 in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam 
 antagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune 
 to account for his position, but at that time it was ne- 
 cessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious stran- 
 gers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that 
 the unfortunate young man had not only been "sent 
 out," but had undergone more than one colonial con- 
 viction. 
 
 As I grew older, my great desire was to be a me- 
 chanical engineer, but the fates were against this and, 
 while very young, I commenced the study of medicine 
 under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the In- 
 stitute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not 
 own me, I am not sure that I have not all along been 
 a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium. 
 I am now occasionally horrified to think how verv 
 little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art 
 of healing. The only part of my professional course
 
 6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 which really and deeply interested me was physiology, 
 which is the mechanical engineering of living machines ; 
 and, notwithstanding that natural science has been my 
 proper business, I am afraid there is very little of the 
 genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, 
 and species work was always a burden to me; what I 
 cared for was the architectural and engineering part 
 of the business, the working out of the wonderful unity 
 of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse 
 living constructions, and the modifications of similar 
 apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary 
 attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of 
 living structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. 
 I was a mere boy I think between thirteen and 
 fourteen years of age when I was taken by some 
 older student friends of mine to the first post-mortem 
 examination I ever attended. All my life I have been 
 most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables 
 which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occa- 
 sion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and 
 I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not 
 cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of 
 dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was 
 somehow, and I remember sinking into a strange state 
 of apathy. By way of a last chance, I was sent to the 
 care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's 
 who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwick- 
 shire. I remember staggering from my bed to the win- 
 dow on the bright spring morning after my arrival, 
 and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to come 
 back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the 
 faint odor of wood-smoke, like that which floated across 
 the farm-yard in the early morning, is as good to me 
 as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon re-
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7 
 
 covered, but for years I suffered from occasional 
 paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time my 
 constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, com- 
 menced his half century of co-tenancy of my fleshly 
 tabernacle. 
 
 Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to 
 say that I do not think that any account of my doings 
 as a student would tend to edification. In fact, I 
 should distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imi- 
 tating my example. I worked extremely hard when 
 it pleased me, and when it did not which was a very 
 frequent case I was extremely idle (unless making 
 caricatures of one's pastors and masters is to be 
 called a branch of industry), or else wasted my ener- 
 gies in wrong directions. I read everything I could 
 lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all 
 sorts of pursuits to drop them again quite as speedily. 
 No doubt it was very largely my own fault, but the 
 only instruction from which I ever obtained the proper 
 effect of education was that which I received from 
 Mr. Wharton Jones, who was the lecturer on physi- 
 ology at the Charing Cross School of Medicine. The 
 extent and precision of his knowledge impressed me 
 greatly, and the severe exactness of his method of lec- 
 turing was quite to my taste. I do not know that I 
 have ever felt so much respect for anybody as a teacher 
 before or since. I worked hard to obtain his approba- 
 tion, and he was extremely kind and helpful to the 
 youngster who, I am afraid, took up more of his time 
 than he had any right to do. It was he who suggested 
 the publication of my first scientific paper a very 
 little one in the Medical Gazette of 1845, and most 
 kindly corrected the literary faults which abounded 
 in it, short as it was ; for at that time, and for many
 
 8 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 years afterwards, I detested the trouble of writing, 
 and would take no pains over it. 
 
 It was in the early spring of 1846, that, having 
 finished my obligatory medical studies and passed 
 the first M.D. examination at the London University, 
 though I was still too young to qualify at the Col- 
 lege of Surgeons, I was talking to a fellow-student 
 (the present eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), 
 and wondering what I should do to meet the impera- 
 tive necessity for earning my own bread, when my 
 friend suggested that I should write to Sir William 
 Burnett, at that time Director-General for the Medical 
 Service of the Navy, for an appointment. I thought 
 this rather a strong thing to do, as Sir William was 
 personally unknown to me, but my cheery friend 
 would not listen to my scruples, so I went to my lodg- 
 ings and wrote the best letter I could devise. A few 
 days afterwards I received the usual official circular 
 acknowledgment, but at the bottom there was written 
 an instruction to call at Somerset House on such a 
 day. I thought that looked like business, so at the ap- 
 pointed time I called and sent in my card, while I 
 waited in Sir William's ante-room. He was a tall, 
 shrewd-looking old gentleman, with a broad Scotch 
 accent and I think I see him now as he entered with 
 my card in his hand. The first thing he did was to re- 
 turn it, with the frugal reminder that I should prob- 
 ably find it useful on some other occasion. The second 
 was to ask whether I was an Irishman. I suppose 
 the air of modesty about my appeal must have struck 
 him. I satisfied the Director-General that I was Eng- 
 glish to the backbone, and he made some inquiries 
 as to my student career, finally desiring me to hold 
 myself ready for examination. Having passed this,
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 9 
 
 I was in Her Majesty's Service, and entered on the 
 books of Nelson's old ship, the Victory, for duty at 
 Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months after I 
 made my application. 
 
 My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable 
 person, the late Sir John Richardson, an excellent 
 naturalist, and far-famed as an indomitable Arctic 
 traveller. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the 
 circle of his family and intimates; and, having a full 
 share of youthful vanity, I was extremely disgusted 
 to find that " Old John," as we irreverent youngsters 
 called him, took not the slightest notice of my wor- 
 shipful self either the first time I attended him, as it 
 was my duty to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I 
 am afraid to think of the lengths to which my tongue 
 may have run on the subject of the churlishness of 
 the chief, who was, in truth, one of the kindest-hearted 
 and most considerate of men. But one day, as I was 
 crossing the hospital square, Sir John stopped me, 
 and heaped coals of fire on my head by telling me that 
 he had tried to get me one of the resident appointments, 
 much coveted by the assistant surgeons, but that the 
 Admiralty had put in another man. " However," said 
 he, " I mean to keep you here till I can get you some- 
 thing you will like," and turned upon his heel without 
 waiting for the thanks I stammered out. That ex- 
 plained how it was I had not been packed off to the 
 West Coast of Africa like some of my juniors, and why, 
 eventually, I remained altogether seven months at 
 Haslar. 
 
 After a long interval, during which "Old John" 
 ignored my existence almost as completely as before, 
 he stopped me again as we met in a casual way, and 
 describing the service on which the Rattlesnake was
 
 10 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 likely to be employed, said that Captain Ow'en Stanley, 
 who was to command the ship, had asked him to re- 
 commend an assistant surgeon who knew something 
 of science ; would I like that ? Of course I jumped at 
 the offer. " Very well, I give you leave; go to London 
 at once and see Captain Stanley." I went, saw my 
 future commander, who was very civil to me, and 
 promised to ask that I should be appointed to his ship, 
 as in due time I was. It is a singular thing that, during 
 the few months of my stay at Haslar, I had among 
 my messmates two future Directors-General of the 
 Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alexander Armstrong 
 and Sir John Watt-Reid), with the present President 
 of the College of Physicians and my kindest of doctors, 
 Sir Andrew Clark. 
 
 Life on board Her Majesty's ship in those days 
 was a very different affair from what it is now, and 
 ours was exceptionally rough, as we were often many 
 months without receiving letters or seeing any civilised 
 people but ourselves. In exchange, we had the inter- 
 est of being about the last voyagers, I suppose, to 
 whom it could be possible to meet with people who 
 knew nothing of fire-arms as we did on the south 
 coast of New Guinea and of making acquaintance 
 with a variety of interesting savage and semi-civilised 
 people. But, apart from experience of this kind and 
 the opportunities offered for scientific work, to me, 
 personally, the cruise was extremely valuable. It was 
 good for me to live under sharp discipline ; to be down 
 on the realities of existence by living on bare necessa- 
 ries; to find out how extremely well worth living life 
 seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest 
 on a soft plank, with the sky for canopy and cocoa 
 and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast;
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 11 
 
 and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake of 
 what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the 
 bottom and I along with it. My brother officers were 
 as good fellows as sailors ought to be and generally 
 are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared any- 
 thing about my pursuits, nor understood why I should 
 be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends, 
 the middies, christened " Buffons," after the title con- 
 spicuous on a volume of the Suites a Buffon, which 
 stood on my shelf in the chart room. 
 
 During the four years of our absence, I sent home 
 communication after communication to the " Linnean 
 Society," with the same result as that obtained by 
 Noah when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired 
 at last of hearing nothing about them, I determined 
 to do or die, and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate 
 paper and forwarded it to the Royal Society. This was 
 my dove, if I had only known it. But owing to the 
 movements of the ship, I heard nothing of that either 
 until my return to England in the latter end of the 
 year 1850, when I found that it was printed and pub- 
 lished, and that a huge packet of separate copies 
 awaited me. When I hear some of my young friends 
 complain of want of sympathy and encouragement, 
 I am inclined to think that my naval life was not the 
 least valuable part of my education. 
 
 Three years after my return were occupied by a 
 battle between my scientific friends on the one hand 
 and the Admiralty on the other, as to whether the 
 latter ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a 
 pledge they had given to encourage officers who had 
 done scientific work by contributing to the expense of 
 publishing mine. At last the Admiralty, getting tired, 
 I suppose, cut short the discussion by ordering me
 
 12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 to join a ship, which thing I declined to do, and as 
 Rastignac, in the Pere Goriot says to Paris, I said to 
 London " a nous deux." I desired to obtain a Professor- 
 ship of either Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and 
 as vacancies occurred I applied, but in vain. My friend, 
 Professor Tyndall, and I were candidates at the same 
 time, he for the Chair of Physics and I for that of 
 Natural History in the University of Toronto, which, 
 fortunately, as it turned out, would not look at either 
 of us. I say fortunately, not from any lack of respect 
 for Toronto, but because I soon made up my mind 
 that London was the place for me, and hence I have 
 steadily declined the inducements to leave it, which 
 have at various times been offered. At last, in 1854, 
 on the translation of my warm friend Edward Forbes, 
 to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director- 
 General of the Geological Survey, offered me the post 
 Forbes vacated of Paleontologist and Lecturer on Nat- 
 ural History. I refused the former point blank, and 
 accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry 
 that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give 
 up Natural History as soon as I could get a physio- 
 logical post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, 
 and a large part of my work has been paleontological. 
 At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a 
 firm conviction that I should break down even 7 time 
 I opened my mouth. I believe I had every fault^a 
 speaker could have (except talking at random or in- 
 dulging in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first import- 
 ant audience I ever addressed, on a Friday evening 
 at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet, I must confess 
 to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public 
 speaking as most of my contemporaries, and for the 
 last ten years -it ceased to be so much of a bugbear to
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13 
 
 me. I used to pity myself for having to go through this 
 training, but I am now more disposed to compassion- 
 ate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever 
 friendly hearers at the Royal Institution, who were 
 the subjects of my oratorical experiments. 
 
 The last thing that it would be proper for me to 
 do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say 
 at the end of the day whether I think I have earned 
 my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges 
 of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men 
 are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look 
 back and the mountain they set themselves to climb in 
 youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably 
 higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the 
 top. But if I may speak of the objects I have had more 
 or less definitely in view since I began the ascent of my 
 hillock, they are briefly these : To promote the increase 
 of natural knowledge and to forward the application 
 of scientific methods of investigation to all the prob- 
 lems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction 
 which has grown with my growth and strengthened 
 with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the 
 sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and 
 of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is 
 when the garment of make-believe by which pious 
 hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off. 
 v It is with this intent that I have subordinated any 
 reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific- 
 fame which I may have permitted myself to entertain 
 to other ends; to the popularization of science; to the 
 development and organisation of scientific education ; 
 to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over 
 evolution ; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesias- 
 tical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as
 
 14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may 
 belong, is the deadly enemy of science. 
 
 In striving for the attainment of these objects, I 
 have been but one among many, and I shall be well 
 content to be remembered, or even not remembered, as 
 such. Circumstances, among which I am proud to 
 reckon the devoted kindness of many friends, have 
 led to my occupation of various prominent positions, 
 among which the Presidency of the Royal Society is the 
 highest. It would be mock modesty on my part, with 
 these and other scientific honours which have been 
 bestowed upon me, to pretend that I have not suc- 
 ceeded in the career which I have followed, rather be- 
 cause I was driven into it than of my own free will ; 
 but I am afraid I should not count even these things 
 as marks of success if I could not hope that I had 
 somewhat helped that movement of opinion which 
 has been called the New Reformation.
 
 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 
 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 THIS time two hundred years ago in the begin- 
 ning of January, 1666 those of our forefathers who 
 inhabited this great and ancient city, took breath be- 
 tween the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not 
 quite past, although its fury had abated; the other to 
 come. 
 
 Within a few yards of the very spot on which we 
 are assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and 
 deadly malady, the plague, appeared in the latter 
 months of 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote 
 the people of England, and especially of her capital, 
 with a violence unknown before, in the course of the 
 following year. The hand of a master has pictured 
 what happened in those dismal months; and in that 
 truest of fictions, The History of tlie Plague Year, 
 Defoe shows death, with every accompaniment of pain 
 and terror, stalking through the narrow streets of old 
 London, and changing their busy hum into a silence 
 broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty 
 thousand dead ; by the woful denunciations and mad 
 prayers of fanatics; and by the madder yells of de- 
 spairing profligates. 
 
 But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had 
 sunk to nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague 
 occurred only here and there, and the richer citizens 
 who had flown from the pest had returned to their 
 dwellings. The remnant of the people began to toil 
 at the accustomed round of duty, or of pleasure; and
 
 16 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 the stream of city life bid fair to flow back along its 
 old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigour. 
 
 The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great 
 plague, indeed, returned no more ; but what it had done 
 for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in 
 the autumn of 1666, did for London ; and, in Septem- 
 ber of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestruc- 
 tible energy of the people were all that remained 
 of the glory of five-sixths of the city within the 
 walls. 
 
 Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting 
 for each of these calamities. They submitted to the 
 plague in humility and in penitence, for they believed 
 it to be the judgment of God. But, towards the fire 
 they were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the 
 effect of the malice of man, as the work of the 
 Republicans, or of the Papists, according as their 
 prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of Puri- 
 tanism. 
 
 It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, 
 standing where I now stand, in what was then a thickly 
 peopled and fashionable part of London, should have 
 broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now 
 propound to you that all their hypotheses were alike 
 wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense, 
 Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any 
 political, or of any religious sect; but that they were 
 themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and 
 that they must look to themselves to prevent the re- 
 currence of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly 
 beyond the reach of human control so evidently the 
 result of the wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety 
 of an enemy.
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 17 
 
 And one may picture to one's self how harmoni- 
 ously the holy cursing of the Puritan of that day 
 would have chimed in with the unholy cursing and 
 the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys, and 
 with the revilings of the political fanatics, if my 
 imaginary plain dealer had gone on to say that, if the 
 return of such misfortunes were ever rendered impos- 
 sible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the 
 faith of Laud, or of that of Milton ; and, as little, by 
 the triumph of republicanism, as by that of monarchy. 
 But that the one thing needful for compassing this 
 end was, that the people of England should second 
 the efforts of an insignificant corporation, the estab- 
 lishment of which, a few years before the epoch of the 
 great plague and the great fire, had been as little no- 
 ticed, as they were conspicuous. 
 
 Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague 
 a few calm and thoughtful students banded themselves 
 together for the purpose, as they phrased it, of "im- 
 proving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed 
 to attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the 
 words of one of the founders of the organisation : 
 
 " Our business was (precluding matters of theology 
 and state affairs) to discourse and consider of philo- 
 sophical enquiries, and such as related thereunto : 
 as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navi- 
 gation, Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, 
 and Natural Experiments; with the state of these 
 studies and their cultivation at home and abroad. We 
 then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the 
 valves in the veins, the vense lactese, the lymphatic 
 vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets 
 and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape
 
 18 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots on the sun 
 and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and 
 selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus 
 and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes and 
 grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, 
 the possibility or impossibility of vacuities and nature's 
 abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in 
 quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree 
 of acceleration therein, with divers other things of like 
 nature, some of which were then but new discoveries, 
 and others not so generally known and embraced as 
 now they are; with other things appertaining to what 
 hath been called the New Philosophy, which from the 
 times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon 
 (Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much culti- 
 vated in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts 
 abroad, as well as with us in England." 
 
 The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696, narrates 
 in these words, what happened half a century before, 
 or about 1645. The associates met at Oxford, in the 
 rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to become a 
 bishop ; and subsequently coming together in London, 
 they attracted the notice of the king. And it is a strange 
 evidence of the taste for knowledge which the most ob- 
 viously worthless of the Stuarts shared with his father 
 and grandfather, that Charles the Second was not 
 content with saying witty things about his philosophers, 
 but did wise things with regard to them. For he not 
 only bestowed upon them such attention as he could 
 spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but, being 
 in his usual state of impecuniosity, begged for them 
 of the Duke of Ormond; and, that step being without 
 effect, gave them Chelsea College, a charter, and a 
 mace : crowning his favours in the best way they could
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 19 
 
 be crowned, by burdening them no further with royal 
 patronage or state interference. 
 
 Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studi- 
 ous of the " New Philosophy," who met in one another's 
 lodgings in Oxford or in London, in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century, grew in numerical and in real 
 strength, until, in its latter part, the "Royal Society for 
 the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already 
 become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the 
 veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since re- 
 tained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in 
 our islands, and the chief champion of the cause it was 
 formed to support. 
 
 It was by the aid of the Royal Society that Newton 
 published his Principia. If all the books in the world , 
 except the Philosophical Transactions, were destroyed, 
 it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science 
 would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual 
 progress of the last two centuries would be largely, 
 though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs 
 of halting or of decrepitude manifested themselves 
 in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so in these, 
 "our business is, precluding theology and state af- 
 fairs, to discourse and consider of philosophical en- 
 quiries." But our " Mathematick " is one which 
 Newton would have to go to school to learn ; our " Sta- 
 ticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Nat- 
 ural Experiments" constitute a mass of physical and 
 chemical knowledge, a glimpse at which would com- 
 pensate Galileo for the doings of a score of inquisi- 
 torial cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" 
 have embraced such infinite varieties of beings, have 
 laid open such new worlds in time and space, have 
 grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex prob-
 
 20 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 lems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be 
 dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of 
 their grain of mustard seed. 
 
 The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too 
 little, forced upon one's notice, nowadays, that all 
 this marvellous intellectual growth has a no less won- 
 derful expression in practical life; and that, in this 
 respect, if in no other, the movement symbolised by 
 the progress of the Royal Society stands without a 
 parallel in fhe history of mankind. 
 
 A series of volumes as bulky as the "Transactions 
 of the Royal Society" might possibly be filled with 
 the subtle speculations of the Schoolmen; not im- 
 probably, the obtaining a mastery over the products 
 of mediaeval thought might necessitate an even greater 
 expenditure of time and of energy than the acquire- 
 ment of the " New Philosophy" ; but though such work 
 engrossed the best intellects of Europe for a longer 
 time than has elapsed since the great fire, its effects 
 were " writ in water," so far as our social state is con- 
 cerned. 
 
 On the other hand, if the noble first President of 
 the Royal Society could revisit the upper air and once 
 more gladden his eyes with a sight of the familiar 
 mace, he would find himself in the midst of a material 
 civilisation more different from that of his day, than 
 that of the seventeenth was from that of the first cen- 
 tury. And if Lord Brouncker's native sagacity had 
 not deserted his ghost, he would need no long reflec- 
 tion to discover that all these great ships, these rail- 
 ways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing- 
 presses, without which the whole fabric of modern 
 English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant 
 and starving pauperism, that all these pillars of
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 21 
 
 our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the 
 surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of 
 which only, he and his fellows were privileged to see; 
 and seeing, to recognise as that which it behoved them 
 above all things to keep pure and undefiled. 
 
 It may not be too great a flight of imagination to 
 conceive our noble revenant riot forgetful of the great 
 troubles of his own day, and anxious to know how 
 often London had been burned dow*n since his time, 
 and how often the plague had carried off its thousands. 
 He would have to learn that, although London con- 
 tains tenfold the inflammable matter that it did in 
 1666; though, not content with filling our rooms with 
 woodwork and light draperies, we must needs lead in- 
 flammable and explosive gases into every corner of 
 our streets and houses, we never allow even a street 
 to burn down. And if he asked how this had come 
 about, we should have to explain that the improve- 
 ment of natural knowledge has furnished us with 
 dozens of machines for throwing water upon fires, any 
 one of which would have furnished the ingenious Mr. 
 Hooke, the first "curator and experimenter" of the 
 Royal Society, with ample materials for discourse before 
 half a dozen meetings of that body; and that, to say 
 truth, except for the progress of natural knowledge, 
 we should not have been able to make even the tools 
 by which these machines are constructed. And, further, 
 it would be necessary to add, that although severe fires 
 sometimes occur and inflict great damage, the loss 
 is very generally compensated by societies, the opera- 
 tions of which have been rendered possible only by 
 the progress of natural knowledge in the direction of 
 mathematics, and the accumulation of wealth in vir- 
 tue of other natural knowledge.
 
 22 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 But the plague ? My Lord Brouncker's observation 
 would not, I fear, lead him to think that Englishmen 
 of the nineteenth century are purer in life, or more fer- 
 vent in religious faith, than the generation which could 
 produce a Boyle, an Evelyn, and a Milton. He might 
 find the mud of society at the bottom, instead of at the 
 top, but I fear that the sum total would be as deserving 
 of swift judgment as at the time of the Restoration. 
 And it would be our duty to explain once more, and 
 this time not without shame, that -we have no reason 
 to believe that it is the improvement of our faith, nor 
 that of our morals, which keeps the plague from our 
 city; but, again, that it is the improvement of our 
 natural knowledge. 
 
 We have learned that pestilences will only take 
 up their abode among those who have prepared un- 
 swept and ungarnished residences for them. Their 
 cities must have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with 
 accumulated garbage. Their houses must be ill- 
 drained, ill-lighted, ill- ventilated. Their subjects must 
 be ill- washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed. The London of 1665 
 was such a city. The cities of the East, 'where plague 
 has an enduring dwelling, are such cities. We, in 
 later times, have learned somewhat of Nature, and 
 partly obey her. Because of this partial improvement 
 of our natural knowledge and of that fractional obedi- 
 ence, we have no plague; because that knowledge is 
 still very imperfect and that obedience yet incomplete, 
 typhoid is our companion and cholera our visitor. 
 But it is not presumptuous to express the belief that, 
 when our knowledge is more complete and our obedi- 
 ence the expression of our knowledge, London will 
 count her centuries of freedom from typhoid and 
 cholera, as she now gratefully reckons her two hundred
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 23 
 
 years of ignorance of that plague which swooped upon 
 her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century. 
 
 Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which 
 is not fully borne out by the facts ? Surely, the prin- 
 ciples involved in them are now admitted among the 
 fixed beliefs of all thinking men ? Surely, it is true 
 that our countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, 
 pestilence, and all the evils which result from a want 
 of command over and due anticipation of the course 
 of Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton; and 
 health, wealth, and well-being are more abundant with 
 us than with them ? But no less certainly is the differ- 
 ence due to the improvement of our knowledge of Nature, 
 and the extent to which that improved knowledge has 
 been incorporated with the household words of men, 
 and has supplied the springs of their daily actions. 
 
 Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that 
 which the depredators of natural knowledge are so 
 fond of urging, that its improvement can only add to 
 the resources of our material civilisation; admitting 
 it to be possible that the founders of the Royal Society 
 themselves looked for not other reward than this, I 
 cannot confess that I was guilty of exaggeration when 
 I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing 
 between prominent events and important events, the 
 origin of a combined effort on the part of mankind 
 to improve natural knowledge might have loomed 
 larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare 
 of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of 
 beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which 
 the damage done by those ghastly evils would shrink 
 into insignificance. 
 
 It is very certain that for every victim slain by 
 the plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a
 
 24 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 fair share of happiness in the world by the aid of 
 the spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, 
 could not have burned the supply of coal, the daily 
 working of which, in the bowels of the earth, made 
 possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an amount 
 of wealth to which the millions lost in old London are 
 but as an old song. 
 
 But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, 
 but toys, possessing an accidental value; and natural 
 knowledge creates multitudes of more subtle con- 
 trivances, the praises of which do not happen to be 
 sung because they are not directly convertible into 
 instruments for creating wealth. When I contemplate 
 natural knowledge squandering such gifts among men, 
 the only appropriate comparison I can find for her 
 is to liken her to such a peasant woman as one sees 
 in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, 
 and with mind bent only on her home ; but yet without 
 effort and without thought, knitting for her children. 
 Now stockings are good and comfortable things, and the 
 children will undoubtedly be much the better for them ; 
 but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the least of 
 it, to depreciate this toiling mother as a mere stocking- 
 machine a mere provider of physical comforts ? 
 
 However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and 
 not a few of them, who take this view of natural 
 knowledge, and can see nothing in the bountiful 
 mother of humanity but a sort of comfort-grinding 
 machine. According to them, the improvement of 
 natural knowledge always has been, and always must 
 be, synonymous with no more than the improvement 
 of the material resources and the increase of the grati- 
 fications of men. 

 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 25 
 
 Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother 
 of mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, 
 if need be, with sternness, in the way they should go, 
 and instructing them in all things needful for their 
 welfare; but a sort of fairy god-mother, ready to 
 furnish her pets with shoes of swiftness, swords of 
 sharpness, and omnipotent Aladdin's lamps, so that 
 they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and see the other 
 side of the moon, and thank God they are better than 
 their benighted ancestors. 
 
 If this talk were true, I, for one, should not greatly 
 care to toil in the service of natural knowledge. I 
 think I would just as soon be quietly chipping my own 
 flint axe, after the manner of my forefathers a few 
 thousand years back, as be troubled with the endless 
 malady of thought which now infests us all, for such 
 reward. But I venture to say that such views are con- 
 trary alike to reason and to fact. Those who discourse 
 in such fashion seem to me to be so intent upon trying 
 to see what is above Nature, or what is behind her, 
 that they are blind to what stares them in the face in 
 her. 
 
 I should not venture thus to speak strongly if my jus- 
 tification were not to be found in the simplest and most 
 obvious facts, if it needed more than an appeal to 
 the most notorious truths to justify my assertion, that 
 the improvement of natural knowledge, whatever 
 direction it has taken, and however low the aims of 
 those who may have commenced it has not only 
 conferred practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, 
 has effected a revolution in their conceptions of the 
 universe and of themselves, and has profoundly 
 altered their modes of thinking and their views of 
 right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seek-
 
 26 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 ing to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which 
 can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural 
 knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of com- 
 fort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and 
 to lay the foundations of a new morality. 
 
 Let us take these points separately; and first, what 
 great ideas has natural knowledge introduced into 
 men's minds? 
 
 I cannot but think that the foundations of all nat- 
 ural knowledge were laid when the reason of man 
 first came face to face with the facts of Nature ; when 
 the savage first learned that the fingers of one hand 
 are fewer than those of both ; that it is shorter to cross 
 a stream than to head it; that a stone stops where it 
 is unless it be moved, and that it drops from the hand 
 which lets it go ; that light and heat come and go with 
 the sun ; that sticks burn away in a fire ; that plants and 
 animals grow and die ; that if he struck his fellow sav- 
 age a blow he would make him angry, and perhaps get 
 a blow in return, while if he offered him a fruit he would 
 please him, and perhaps receive a fish in exchange. 
 When men had acquired this much knowledge, the 
 outlines, rude though they were, of mathematics, of 
 physics, of chemistry, of biology, of moral, economical, 
 and political science, were sketched. Nor did the germ 
 of religion fail when science began to bud. Listen to 
 words which, though new, are yet three thousand 
 years old : 
 
 . . . When in heaven the stars about the moon 
 Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, 
 And every height comes out, and jutting peak 
 And valley, and the immeasurable heavens 
 Break open to their highest, and all the stars 
 Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart.
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 2T 
 
 If the half savage Greek could share our feelings 
 thus far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, 
 to find as we do, that upon that brief gladness there 
 follows a certain sorrow, the little light of awak- 
 ened human intelligence shines so mere a spark 
 amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; 
 seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the 
 imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspira- 
 tions that cannot be realised, of man's own nature. 
 But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limita- 
 tion of man, this sense of an open secret which he 
 cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and 
 the attempt to embody it in the forms furnished by 
 the intellect is the origin of the higher theologies. 
 
 Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the 
 foundations of all knowledge secular or sacred 
 were laid when intelligence dawned, though the 
 superstructure remained for long ages so slight and 
 feeble as to be compatible with the existence of almost 
 any general view respecting the mode of governance 
 of the universe. No doubt, from the first, there were 
 certain phsenomena which, to the rudest mind, pre- 
 sented a constancy of occurrence, and suggested that a 
 fixed order ruled, at any rate, among them. I doubt 
 if the grossest of Fetish worshippers ever imagined 
 that a stone must have a god within it to make it fall, 
 or that a fruit had a god within it to make it taste 
 sweet. With regard to such matters as these, it is hardly 
 questionable that mankind from the first took strictly 
 positive and scientific views. 
 
 But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences 
 which present themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, 
 has always taken himself as the standard of compari- 
 son, as the centre and measure of the world ; nor could
 
 28 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 he well avoid doing so. And finding that his apparently 
 uncaused will has a powerful effect in giving rise to 
 many occurrences, he naturally enough ascribed 
 other and greater events to other and greater volitions, 
 and came to look upon the world and all that therein is, 
 as the product of the volitions of persons like himself, 
 but stronger, and capable of being appeased or an- 
 gered, as he himself might be soothed or irritated. 
 Through such conceptions of the plan and working 
 of the universe all mankind have passed, or are passing. 
 And we may now consider what has been the effect 
 of the improvement of natural knowledge on the views 
 of men who have reached this stage, and who have be- 
 gun to cultivate natural knowledge with no desire but 
 that of "increasing God's honour and bettering man's 
 estate." 
 
 For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere 
 material point of view, more innocent, from a theo- 
 logical one, to an ancient people, than that they should 
 learn the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings 
 for their husbandmen ; or the position of the stars, as 
 guides to their rude navigators ? But what has grown 
 out of this search for natural knowledge of so merely 
 useful a character? You all know the reply. Astron- 
 omy, which of all sciences has filled men's minds 
 with general ideas of a character most foreign to their 
 daily experience, and has, more than any other, ren- 
 dered it impossible for them to accept the beliefs of 
 their fathers. Astronomy, which tells them that 
 this so vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom 
 among atoms, whirling, no man knows whither, through 
 illimitable space; which demonstrates that what we 
 call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that space, 
 filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 29 
 
 are seething and surging, like the waves of an angry 
 sea; which opens up to us infinite regions where 
 nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known, 
 but matter and force, operating according to rigid 
 rules ; which leads us to contemplate phenomena the 
 very nature of which demonstrates that they must 
 have had a beginning, and that they must have an 
 end, but the very nature of which also proves that 
 the beginning was, to our conceptions of time, infi- 
 nitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably 
 distant. 
 
 But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who 
 ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless 
 than the attempt to lift and distribute water by pump- 
 ing it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? 
 Yet out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's 
 abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered 
 that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air 
 has weight; and that notion paved the way for the 
 doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force 
 which produces weight is co-extensive with the uni- 
 verse, in short, to the theory of universal gravita- 
 tion and endless force. While learning how to handle 
 gases led to the discovery of oxygen, and to modern 
 chemistry, and to the notion of the indestructibility 
 of matter. 
 
 Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, 
 than the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from 
 heating when the wheel turns round very fast ? HO\N 
 useful for carters and gig drivers to know something 
 about this; and how good were it, if any ingenious per- 
 son would find out the cause of such phenomena, and 
 thence educe a general remedy for them. Such an 
 ingenious person was Count Rumfor^l; and he and
 
 30 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 his successors have landed us in the theory of the per- 
 sistence, or indestructibility, of force. And in the in- 
 finitely minute, as in the infinitely great, the seekers 
 after natural knowledge of the kinds called physical 
 and chemical, have everywhere found a definite order 
 and succession of events which seem never to be in- 
 fringed. 
 
 And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anat- 
 omy? Have the anatomist, the physiologist, or the 
 physician, whose business it has been to devote them- 
 selves assiduously to that eminently practical and direct 
 end, the alleviation of the sufferings of mankind, 
 have they been able to confine their vision more ab- 
 solutely to the strictly useful ? I fear they are the worst 
 offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before 
 us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical 
 eternity of the duration of the universe ; if the physical 
 and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the 
 infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the 
 practical eternity of matter and of force ; and if both 
 have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite 
 and predicable order and succession of events, the 
 workers in biology have not only accepted all these, 
 but have added more startling theses of their own. 
 For, as the astronomers discover in the earth no cen- 
 tre of the universe, but an eccentric speck, so the natu- 
 ralists find man to be no centre of the living world, 
 but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as 
 the astronomers observe the mark of practically end- 
 less time set upon the arrangements of the solar sys- 
 tem so the student of life finds the records of ancient 
 forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, 
 in relation to human experience, are infinite. 
 
 Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 31 
 
 dependent for its manifestation of particular molec- 
 ular arrangements as any physical or chemical phe- 
 nomenon ; and wherever he extends his researches, 
 fixed order and unchanging causation reveal them- 
 selves, as plainly as in the rest of Nature. 
 
 Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the 
 germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of 
 knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's 
 mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken 
 the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; 
 of Theism or Atheism ; of Superstition or Rationalism. 
 With these, and their relative merits and demerits, 
 I have nothing to do ; but this it is needful for my pur- 
 pose to say, that if the religion of the present differs 
 from that of the past, it is because the theology of the 
 present has become more scientific than that of the 
 past ; because it has not only renounced idols of wood 
 and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of 
 breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and tra- 
 ditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of 
 cherishing the noblest and most human of man's 
 emotions, by worship "for the most part of the silent 
 sort" at the Altar of the Unknown. 
 
 Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted 
 in our minds by the improvement of natural knowledge. 
 Men have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite 
 extent of the universe and of its practical eternity ; they 
 are familiar with the conception that our earth is but 
 an infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe 
 which can be seen ; and that, nevertheless, its duration 
 is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite. 
 They have further acquired the idea that man is but 
 one of innumerable forms of life now existing on the 
 globe, and that the present existences are but the last
 
 32 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 of an immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover, 
 every step they have made in natural knowledge has 
 tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conception 
 of a definite order of the universe which is embodied 
 in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws 
 of Nature and to narrow the range and loosen the 
 force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other 
 than such as arise out of that definite order itself. 
 
 Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not 
 the question. No one can deny that they exist, and 
 have been the inevitable outgrowth of the improve- 
 ment of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be 
 doubted that they are changing the form of men's 
 most cherished and most important convictions. 
 
 And as regards the second point the extent to 
 which the improvement of natural knowledge has 
 remodelled and altered what may be termed the intel- 
 lectual ethics of men, what are among the moral 
 convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi- 
 barbarous people? 
 
 They are the convictions that authority is the sound- 
 est basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness 
 to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, 
 and scepticism a sin; that when good authority has 
 pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has ac- 
 cepted it, reason has no further duty. There are many 
 excellent persons who yet hold by these principles, and 
 it is not my present business, or intention, to discuss 
 their views. All I wish to bring clearly before your 
 minds is the unquestionable fact, that the improvement 
 of natural knowledge is effected by methods which 
 directly give the lie to all these convictions, and assume 
 the exact reverse of each to be true.
 
 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 33 
 
 The improver of natural knowledge absolutely re- 
 fuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, 
 scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one 
 unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for 
 every great advance in natural knowledge has involved 
 the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of 
 the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit 
 of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science 
 holds, his firmest convictions, not because the men 
 he most venerates hold them ; not because their verity 
 is testified by portents and wonders; but because his 
 experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to 
 bring these convictions into contact with their primary 
 source, Nature whenever he thinks fit to test them 
 by appealing to experiment and to observation 
 Nature will confirm them. The man of science has 
 learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by 
 verification. 
 
 Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise 
 the practical results of the improvement of natural 
 knowledge, and its beneficial influence on material 
 civilisation, it must, I think, be admitted that the 
 great ideas, some of which I have indicated, and the 
 ethical spirit which I have endeavoured to sketch, in 
 the few moments which remained at my disposal, con- 
 stitute the real and permanent significance of natural 
 knowledge. 
 
 If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to 
 be more and more firmly established as the world grows 
 older; if that spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to ex- 
 tend itself into all departments of human thought, 
 and to become co-extensive with the range of know- 
 ledge; if, as our race approaches its maturity, it dis- 
 covers, as I believe it will, that there is but one kind of
 
 34 ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 
 
 knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then 
 we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest 
 duty to recognise the advisableness of improving natu- 
 ral knowledge, and so to aid ourselves and our succes- 
 sors in our course towards the noble goal which lies 
 before mankind. 

 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 THE business which the South London Working 
 Men's College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, 
 I might say, that Education, with which that college 
 proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those 
 which lie ready to a man's hand just at present. 
 
 And, at length, this fact is becoming generally 
 recognised. You cannot go anywhere without hearing 
 a buzz of more or less confused and contradictory talk 
 on this subject nor can you fail to notice that, in 
 one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance 
 upon like discussions in former days. Nobody outside 
 the agricultural interest now dares to say that education 
 is a bad thing. If any representative of the once large 
 and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed 
 this opinion, still exists in the semi-fossil state, he keeps 
 his thoughts to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of 
 voices, almost distressing in their harmony, raised in 
 favour of the doctrine that education is the great 
 panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country 
 is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be 
 educated. 
 
 The politicians tell us, "You must educate the 
 masses because they are going to be masters." The 
 clergy join in the cry for education, for they affirm that 
 the people are drifting away from church and chapel 
 into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and 
 the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare 
 that ignorance makes bad workmen ; that England will 
 soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam en-
 
 36 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 gines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! 
 Ichabod ! the glory will be departed from us. And a 
 few voices are lifted up in favour of the doctrine that 
 the masses should be educated because they are men 
 and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, 
 and suffering, and that it is as true now, as it ever was, 
 that the people perish for lack of knowledge. 
 
 These members of the minority, with whom I con- 
 fess I have a good deal of sympathy, are doubtful 
 whether any of the other reasons urged in favour of 
 the education of the people are of much value 
 whether, indeed, some of them are based upon either 
 wise or noble grounds of action. They question if it 
 be wise to tell people that you will do for them, out of 
 fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long 
 as your only motive was compassion for their weakness 
 and their sorrows. And, if ignorance of everything 
 which is needful a ruler should know is likely to do 
 so much harm in the governing classes of the future, 
 why is it, they ask reasonably enough, that such igno- 
 rance in the governing classes of the past has not been 
 viewed with equal horror ? 
 
 Compare the average artisan and the average 
 country squire, and it may be doubted if you will 
 find a pin to choose between the two in point of igno- 
 rance, class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the 
 ignorance is of a different sort that the class feel- 
 ing is in favour of a different class and that the pre- 
 judice has a distinct savour of wrong-headedness in 
 each case but it is questionable if the one is either 
 a bit better, or a bit worse, than the other. The old 
 protectionist theory is the doctrine of trades unions 
 as applied by the squires, and the modern trades union- 
 ism is the doctrine of the squires applied by the arti-
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 37 
 
 sans. Why should we be worse off under one regime 
 than under the other? 
 
 Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to 
 think whether it is really want of education which 
 keeps the masses away from their ministrations 
 whether the most completely educated men are not as 
 open to reproach on this score as the workmen ; and 
 whether, perchance, this may not indicate that it is 
 not education which lies at the bottom of the matter ? 
 
 Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, 
 venture to doubt whether the glory which rests upon 
 being able to undersell all the rest of the world, is a 
 very safe kind of glory whether we may not pur- 
 chase it too dear; especially if we allow education, 
 which ought to be directed to the making of men, to be 
 diverted into a process of manufacturing human tools, 
 wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some technical 
 industry, but good for nothing else. 
 
 And, finally, these people inquire whether it is 
 the masses alone who need a reformed and improved 
 education. They ask whether the richest of our pub- 
 lic schools might not well be made to supply knowledge, 
 as well as gentlemanly habits, a strong class feeling, 
 and eminent proficiency in cricket. They seem to 
 think that the noble foundations of our old universities 
 are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present 
 posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, 
 where men are trained to win a senior wranglership, or 
 a double-first, as horses are trained to win a cup, with 
 as little reference to the needs of after-life in the case 
 of a man as in that of the racer. And, while as zealous 
 for education as the rest, they affirm that, if the edu- 
 cation of the richer classes were such as to fit them to 
 be the leaders and the governors of the poorer; and,
 
 38 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 if the education of the poorer classes were such as to 
 enable them to appreciate really wise guidance and 
 good governance, the politicians need not fear mob- 
 law, nor the clergy lament their want of flocks, nor the 
 capitalists prognosticate the annihilation of the pros- 
 perity of the country. 
 
 Such is the diversity of opinion upon the why and 
 the wherefore of education. And my hearers will be 
 prepared to expect that the practical recommendations 
 which are put forward are not less discordant. There 
 is a loud cry for compulsory education. We English, 
 in spite of constant experience to the contrary, pre- 
 serve a touching faith in the efficacy of acts of Parlia- 
 ment; and I believe we should have compulsory edu- 
 cation in the courses of next session, if there were the 
 least probability that half a dozen leading statesmen 
 of different parties would agree what that education 
 should be. 
 
 Some hold that education without theology is worse 
 than none. Others maintain, quite as strongly, that 
 education with theology is in the same predicament. 
 But this is certain, that those who hold the first opinion 
 can by no means agree what theology should be taught ; 
 and that those who maintain the second are in a small 
 minority. 
 
 At any rate "make people learn to read, write, and 
 cipher," say a great many; and the advice is undoubt- 
 edly sensible as far as it goes. But, as has happened 
 to me in former days, those who, in despair of getting 
 anything better, advocate this measure, are met with 
 the objection that it is very like making a child practise 
 the use of a knife, fork, and spoon, without giving it 
 a particle of meat. I really don't know what reply is to 
 be made to such an objection.
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 39 
 
 But it would be unprofitable to spend more time in 
 disentangling, or rather in showing up the knots in, 
 the ravelled skeins of our neighbours. Much more to 
 the purpose is it to ask if we possess any clue of our 
 own which may guide us among these entanglements. 
 And by way of a beginning, let us ask ourselves 
 What is education ? Above all things, what is our ideal 
 of a thoroughly liberal education ? of that education 
 which, if we could begin life again, we would give our- 
 selves of that education which, if we could mould the 
 fates to our own will, we would give our children ? 
 Well, I know not what may be your conceptions upon 
 this matter, but I will tell you mine, and I hope I 
 shall find that our views are not very discrepant. 
 
 Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and 
 fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, 
 depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. 
 Don't you think that we should all consider it to be 
 a primary duty to learn at least the names and the 
 moves of the pieces ; to have a notion of a gambit, and 
 a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out 
 of check ? Do you not think that we should look with 
 a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father 
 who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its 
 members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from 
 a knight ? 
 
 Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the 
 life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, 
 and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, 
 do depend upon our knowing something of the rules 
 of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated 
 than chess. It is a game which has been played for un- 
 told ages, every man and woman of us being one of the
 
 40 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 two players in a game of his or her own. The chess- 
 board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena ot 
 the universe, the rules of the game are what we call 
 the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is 
 hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, 
 just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that 
 he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest 
 allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, 
 the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflow- 
 ing generosity with which the strong shows delight in 
 strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated 
 without haste, but without remorse. 
 
 My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous 
 picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing 
 at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mock- 
 ing fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel who is 
 playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than 
 win and I should accept it as an image of human 
 life. 
 
 Well, what I mean by Education is learning the 
 rules of this mighty game. In other words, education 
 is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, 
 under which name I include not merely things and 
 their forces, but men and their ways ; and the fashion- 
 ing of the affections and of the will into an earnest and 
 loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For 
 me, education means neither more nor less than this. 
 Anything which professes to call itself education must 
 be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the 
 test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the 
 force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other 
 side. 
 
 It is important to remember that, in strictness, there 
 is no such thing as an uneducated man. Take an ex-
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 41 
 
 treme case. Suppose that an adult man, in the full 
 vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the 
 world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left 
 to do as he best might. How long would he be left 
 uneducated ? Not five minutes. Nature would begin 
 to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the 
 properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be 
 at his elbow telling him to do this and avoid that ; and 
 by slow degrees the man would receive an education 
 which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and ade- 
 quate to his circumstances, though there would be no 
 extras and very few accomplishments. 
 
 And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam 
 or, better still, an Eve, a new and greater world, that 
 of social and moral phenomena, would be revealed. 
 Joys and woes, compared with which all others might 
 seem but faint shadows, would spring from the new 
 relations. Happiness and sorrow would take the place 
 of the coarser monitors, pleasure and pain ; but conduct 
 would still be shaped by the observation of the natural 
 consequences of actions; or, in other words, by the 
 laws of the nature of man. 
 
 To every one of us the world was once as fresh 
 and new as to Adam. And then, long before we were 
 susceptible of any other modes of instruction, Nature 
 took us in hand, and every minute of waking life 
 brought its educational influence, shaping our actions 
 into rough accordance with Nature's laws, so that we 
 might not be ended untimely by too gross disobedience. 
 Nor should I speak of this process of education as 
 past for any one, be he as old as he may. For every 
 man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and 
 as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes 
 to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patient
 
 42 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 education of us in that great university, the universe, 
 of which we are all members Nature having no 
 Test-Acts. 
 
 Those who take honours in Nature's university, 
 who learn the laws which govern men and things and 
 obey them, are the really great and successful men in 
 this world. The great mass of mankind are the " Poll," 
 who pick up just enough to get through without much 
 discredit. Those who won't learn at all are plucked; 
 and then you can't come up again. Nature's pluck 
 means extermination. 
 
 Thus the question of compulsory education is settled 
 so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question 
 was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compul- 
 sory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful 
 in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as 
 wilful disobedience incapacity meets with the same 
 punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even 
 a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow 
 without the word. It is left to you to find out why your 
 ears are boxed. 
 
 The object of what we commonly call education 
 that education in which man intervenes and which 
 I shall distinguish as artificial education is to make 
 good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare 
 the child to receive Nature's education, neither in- 
 capably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; 
 and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her 
 pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In 
 short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipa- 
 tion of natural education. And a liberal education is 
 an artificial education which has not only prepared a 
 man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural 
 laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 43 
 
 upon the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free 
 a hand as her penalties. 
 
 That man, I think, has had a liberal education who 
 has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready 
 servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all 
 the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose 
 intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts 
 of equal strength, and in smooth working order; 
 ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind 
 of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the 
 anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a 
 knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of 
 Nature and of the laws of her operations ; one who, 
 no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose 
 passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 
 the servant of a tender conscience ; who has learned to 
 love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate 
 all vileness, and to respect others as himself. 
 
 Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a 
 liberal education ; for he is, as completely as a man can 
 be, in harmony with Nature. He will make the best 
 of her, and she of him. They will get on together 
 rarely ; she as his ever beneficent mother ; he as her 
 mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and in- 
 terpreter. 

 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 IF a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the 
 city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find them- 
 selves at work in that white substance almost too 
 soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar 
 as "chalk." 
 
 Not only here, but over the whole county of Nor- 
 folk, the well-sinker might carry his shaft down many 
 hundred feet without coming to the end of the chalk; 
 and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared 
 away the face of the land which breasts them, the 
 scarped faces of the high cliffs are often wholly formed 
 of the same material. Northward, the chalk may be 
 followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it 
 appears abruptly in the picturesque western bays of 
 Dorset, and breaks into the Needles of the Isle of 
 Wight; while on the shores of Kent it supplies that 
 long line of white cliffs to which England owes her 
 name of Albion. 
 
 Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, 
 a curved band of white chalk, here broader, and 
 there narrower, might be followed diagonally across 
 England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough 
 Head in Yorkshire a distance of over two hundred 
 and eighty miles as the crow flies. 
 
 From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and 
 the Channel, on the South, the chalk is largely hidden 
 by other deposits ; but, except in the Weald of Kent 
 and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all 
 the south-eastern counties.
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 45 
 
 Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of 
 more than a thousand feet, the English chalk must be 
 admitted to be a mass of considerable magnitude. 
 Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant portion of 
 the whole area occupied by the chalk formation of 
 the globe, which has precisely the same general char- 
 acters as ours, and is found in detached patches, some 
 less, and others more extensive, than the English. 
 
 Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland ; it stretches over 
 a large part of France, the chalk which underlies 
 Paris being, in fact, a continuation of that of the Lon- 
 don basin; it runs through Denmark and Central 
 Europe, and extends southward to North Africa; while 
 eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and 
 may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, 
 in Central Asia. 
 
 If all the points at which true chalk occurs were 
 circumscribed, they would lie within an irregular 
 oval about three thousand miles in long diameter 
 the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, 
 and would many times exceed that of the largest exist- 
 ing inland sea the Mediterranean. 
 
 Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the 
 masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar 
 stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is ex- 
 posed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs. 
 The undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered 
 with sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, 
 have a peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting 
 prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or 
 beautiful. But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided 
 cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and 
 pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary 
 enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant,
 
 46 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk 
 headlands. And, in the East, chalk has its share in 
 the formation of some of the most venerable of moun- 
 tain ranges, such as the Lebanon. 
 
 What is this wide-spread component of the surface 
 of the earth ? and whence did it come ? 
 
 You may think this no very hopeful inquiry. You 
 may not unnaturally suppose that the attempt to solve 
 such problems as these can lead to no result, save that 
 of entangling the inquirer in vague speculations, in- 
 capable of refutation and of verification. 
 
 If such were really the case, I should have selected 
 some other subject than a "piece of chalk" for my 
 discourse. But, in truth, after much deliberation, I 
 have been unable to think of any topic which would so 
 well enable me to lead you to see how solid is the 
 foundation upon which some of the most startling con- 
 clusions of physical science rest. 
 
 A great chapter of the history of the world is written 
 in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can 
 be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct 
 and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth 
 of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I 
 hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, to- 
 night. 
 
 Let me add, that few chapters of human history 
 have a more profound significance for ourselves. I 
 weigh my words well when I assert, that the man 
 who should know the true history of the bit of chalk 
 which every carpenter carries about in his breeches- 
 pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, 
 if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate re- 
 sults, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 47 
 
 of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, 
 than the most learned student who is deep-read in the 
 records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature. 
 
 The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not 
 nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the 
 broad features of the story it has to tell ; and I pro- 
 pose that we now set to work to spell that story out 
 together. 
 
 We all know that if we "burn" chalk the result is 
 quicklime. Chalk, in fact, is a compound of carbonic 
 acid gas, and lime, and when you make it very hot 
 the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left. 
 
 By this method of procedure we see the lime, but 
 we do not see the carbonic acid. If, on the other hand, 
 you were to powder a little chalk and drop it into a 
 good deal of strong vinegar, there would be a great 
 bubbling and fizzing, and, finally, a clear liquid, in 
 which no sign of chalk would appear. Here you see 
 the carbonic acid in the bubbles; the lime, dissolved 
 in the vinegar, vanishes from sight. There are a great 
 many other ways of showing that chalk is essentially 
 nothing but carbonic acid and quicklime. Chemists 
 enunciate the result of all the experiments which 
 prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly com- 
 posed of "carbonate of lime." 
 
 It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of 
 this fact, though it may not seem to help us very far 
 towards what we seek. For carbonate of lime is a widely 
 spread substance, and is met with under very various 
 conditions. All sorts of limestones are composed of 
 more or less pure carbonate of lime. The crust which 
 is often deposited by waters which have drained through 
 limestone rocks, in the form of what are called stalag- 
 mites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or, to take
 
 48 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 a more familiar example, the fur on the inside of a 
 tea-kettle is carbonate of lime; and, for anything 
 chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk might be 
 a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth- 
 kettle, which is kept pretty hot below. 
 
 Let us try another method of making the chalk tell 
 us its own history. To the unassisted eye chalk looks 
 simply like a very loose and open kind of stone. But 
 it is possible to grind a slice of chalk down so thin that 
 you can see through it until it is thin enough, in 
 fact, to be examined with any magnifying power that 
 may be thought desirable. A thin slice of the fur of 
 a kettle might be made in the same way. If it were 
 examined microscopically, it would show itself to be 
 a more or less distinctly laminated mineral substance 
 and nothing more. 
 
 But the slice of chalk presents a totally different 
 appearance when placed under the microscope. The 
 general mass of it is made up of very minute granules ; 
 but, imbedded in this matrix, are innumerable bodies, 
 some smaller and some larger, but, on a rough average, 
 not more than a hundredth of an inch in diameter, 
 having a well-defined shape and structure. A cubic 
 inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds 
 of thousands of these bodies, compacted together with 
 incalculable millions of the granules. 
 
 The examination of a transparent slice gives a good 
 notion of the manner in which the components of the 
 chalk are arranged, and of their relative proportions. 
 But, by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water 
 and then pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain 
 sediments of different degrees of fineness, the granules 
 and the minute rounded bodies may be pretty well 
 separated from one another, and submitted to micro-
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 49 
 
 scopic examination, either as opaque or as transparent 
 objects. By combining the views obtained in these 
 various methods, each of the rounded bodies may be 
 proved to be a beautifully constructed calcareous fabric, 
 made up of a number of chambers, communicating 
 freely with one another. The chambered bodies are 
 of various forms. One of the commonest is something 
 like a badly grown raspberry, being formed of a num- 
 ber of nearly globular chambers of different sizes 
 congregated together. It is called Globigerina, and 
 some specimens of chalk consist of little else than 
 Globigerince and granules. 
 
 Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It 
 is the spoor of the game we are tracking. If we can 
 learn what it is and what are the conditions of its ex- 
 istence, we shall see our way to the origin and past 
 history of the chalk. 
 
 A suggestion which may naturally enough present 
 itself is, that these curious bodies are the result of some 
 process of aggregation which has taken place in the 
 carbonate of lime; that, just as in winter, the rime on 
 our windows simulates the most delicate and elegantly 
 arborescent foliage proving that the mere mineral 
 water may, under certain conditions, assume the out- 
 ward form of organic bodies so this mineral sub- 
 stance, carbonate of lime, hidden away in the bowels 
 of the earth, has taken the shape of these chambered 
 bodies. I am not raising a merely fanciful and unreal 
 objection. Very learned men, in former days, have 
 even entertained the notion that all the formed things 
 found in rocks are of this nature; and if no such con- 
 ception is at present held to be admissible, it is be- 
 cause long and varied experience has now shown that 
 mineral matter never does assume the form and struc-
 
 50 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 ture we find in fossils. If any one were to try to per- 
 suade you that an oyster-shell (which is also chiefly 
 composed of carbonate of lime) had crystallized out of 
 sea-water, I suppose you would laugh at the absurdity. 
 Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all 
 experience tends to show that oyster-shells are formed 
 by the agency of oysters, and in no other way. And if 
 there were no better reasons, we should be justified, on 
 like grounds, in believing that Globigerina is not the 
 product of anything but vital activity. 
 
 Happily, however, better evidence in proof of the 
 organic nature of the Globigerince than that of analogy 
 is forthcoming. It so happens that calcareous skele- 
 tons, exactly similar to the Globigerince of the chalk, 
 are being formed, at the present moment, by minute 
 living creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literally 
 more numerous than the sands of the sea-shore, over 
 a large extent of that part of the earth's surface which 
 is covered by the ocean. 
 
 The history of the discovery of these living Globi- 
 gerince, and of the part which they play in rock build- 
 ing, is singular enough. It is a discovery which, like 
 others of no less scientific importance, has arisen, in- 
 cidentally, out of work devoted to very different and 
 exceedingly practical interests. 
 
 When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned 
 to look out for shoals and rocks; and the more the 
 burthen of their ships increased, the more impera- 
 tively necessary it became for sailors to ascertain with 
 precision the depths of the waters they traversed. Out 
 of this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding 
 line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the 
 recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the 
 sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 51 
 
 At the same time, it became desirable to ascertain 
 and to indicate the nature of the sea-bottom, since this 
 circumstance greatly affects its goodness as holding 
 ground for anchors. Some ingenious tar, whose name 
 deserves a better fate than the oblivion into which it has 
 fallen, attained this object by "arming" the bottom of 
 the lead with a lump of grease, to which more or less of 
 the sand or mud, or broken shells, as the case might 
 be, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But, 
 however well adapted such an apparatus might be 
 for rough nautical purposes, scientific accuracy could 
 not be expected from the armed lead, and to remedy 
 its defects (especially when applied to sounding in 
 great depths) Lieut. Brooke, of the American Navy, 
 some years ago invented a most ingenious machine, 
 by which a considerable portion of the superficial layer 
 of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up 
 from any depth to which the lead descends. 
 
 In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the 
 bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland 
 and the Azores, at a depth of more than ten thousand 
 feet, or two miles, by the help of this sounding appa- 
 ratus. The specimens were sent for examination to 
 Ehrenberg of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, and 
 those able microscopists found that this deep-sea mud 
 was almost entirely composed of the skeletons of living 
 organisms the greater proportion of these being 
 just like the Globigerince already known to occur in 
 the chalk. 
 
 Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in the 
 interests of science, but Lieut. Brooke's method of 
 sounding acquired a high commercial value, when the 
 enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable between 
 this country and the United States was undertaken.
 
 52 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 For it became a matter of immense importance to 
 know, not only the depth of the sea over the whole 
 line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exact 
 nature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of 
 cutting or fraying the strands of that costly rope. The 
 Admiralty consequently ordered Captain Dayman, 
 an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain the 
 depth over the whole line of the cable, and to bring 
 back specimens of the bottom. In former days, such 
 a command as this might have sounded very much like 
 one of the impossible things which the young prince 
 in the Fairy Tales is ordered to do before he can ob- 
 tain the hand of the Princess. However, in the months 
 of June and July, 1857, my friend performed the task 
 assigned to him with great expedition and precision 
 without, so far as I know, having met with any reward 
 of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud which 
 he procured were sent to me to be examined and re- 
 ported upon. 1 
 
 The result of all these operations is, that we know 
 the contours and the nature of the surface-soil covered 
 by the North Atlantic, for a distance of seventeen hun- 
 dred miles from east to west, as well as we know that of 
 any part of the dry land. 
 
 It is a prodigious plain one of the widest and most 
 even plains in the world. If the sea were drained off, 
 you might drive a wagon all the way from Valentia, on 
 the west coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay, in Newfound- 
 land. And, except upon one sharp incline about two 
 
 1 See Appendix to Captain Dayman's " Deep-sea Soundings in the 
 North Atlantic Ocean, between Ireland and Newfoundland, made in 
 H.M.S. Cyclops. Published by order of the Lords Commissioners of 
 the Admiralty, 1858." They have since formed the subject of an 
 elaborate Memoir by Messrs. Parker and Jones, published in the 
 Philosophical Transactions for 1865.
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 53 
 
 hundred miles from Valentia, I am not quite sure that 
 it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle 
 are the ascents and descents upon that long route. 
 From Valentia the road would lie down-hill for about 
 200 miles to the point at which the bottom is now 
 covered by 1700 fathoms of sea-water. Then would 
 come the central plain, more than a thousand miles 
 wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be 
 hardly perceptible, though the depth of water upon it 
 now varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are 
 places in which Mont Blanc might be sunk without 
 showing its peak above water. Beyond this, the as- 
 cent on the American side commences, and gradually 
 leads, for about 300 miles, to the Newfoundland shore. 
 
 Almost the whole of the bottom of this central plain 
 (which extends for many hundred miles in a north 
 and south direction) is covered by a fine mud, which, 
 when brought to the surface, dries into a greyish-white 
 friable substance. You can write with this on a black- 
 board, if you are so inclined; and, to the eye, it is 
 quite like very soft, greyish chalk. Examined chemi- 
 cally, it proves to be composed almost wholly of car- 
 bonate of lime ; and if you make a section of it, in the 
 same way as that of the piece of chalk was made, and 
 view it with the microscope, it presents innumerable 
 Globigerince embedded in a granular matrix. 
 
 Thus this deep-sea mud is substantially chalk. I say 
 substantially, because there are a good many minor 
 differences ; but as these have no bearing on the ques- 
 tion immediately before us, which is the nature of 
 the Globigerince of the chalk, it is unnecessary to 
 speak of them. 
 
 GlobigerincB of every size, from the smallest to the 
 largest, are associated together in the Atlantic mud,
 
 54 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 and the chambers of many are filled by a soft animal 
 matter. This soft substance is, in fact, the remains 
 of the creature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather 
 skeleton, owes its existence and which is an animal 
 of the simplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, 
 a mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts 
 of any kind without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or 
 distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to 
 ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting 
 from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, 
 which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous 
 particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher 
 animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing 
 and multiplying ; of separating from the ocean the small 
 proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in 
 sea-water; and of building up that substance into a 
 skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which can 
 be imitated by no other known agency. 
 
 The notion that animals can live and flourish in the 
 sea, at the vast depths from which apparently living 
 Globigerince have been brought up, does not agree very 
 well with our usual conceptions respecting the condi- 
 tions of animal life; and it is not so absolutely impos- 
 sible as it might at first appear to be, that the Globi- 
 gerinoe of the Atlantic sea-bottom do not live and die 
 where they are found. 
 
 As I have mentioned, the soundings from the great 
 Atlantic plain are almost entirely made up of Globi- 
 gerinoe, with the granules which have been mentioned 
 and some few other calcareous shells ; but a small per- 
 centage of the chalky mud perhaps at most some 
 five per cent of it is of a different nature, and con- 
 sists of shells and skeletons composed of silex, or pure 
 flint. These silicious bodies belong partly to the lowly
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 55 
 
 vegetable organisms which are called Diatomacece, 
 and partly to the minute, and extremely simple, ani- 
 mals, termed Radiolaria. It is quite certain that these 
 creatures do not live at the bottom of the ocean, but 
 at its surface where they may be obtained in pro- 
 digious numbers by the use of a properly constructed 
 net. Hence it follows that these silicious organisms, 
 though they are not heavier than the lightest dust, 
 must have fallen, in some cases, through fifteen thou- 
 sand feet of water, before they reached their final rest- 
 ing-place on the ocean floor. And, considering how 
 large a surface these bodies expose in proportion to their 
 weight, it is probable that they occupy a great length 
 of time in making their burial journey from the surface 
 of the Atlantic to the bottom. 
 
 But if the Radiolaria and Diatoms are thus rained 
 upon the bottom of the sea, from the superficial layer 
 of its waters in which they pass their lives, it is ob- 
 viously possible that the Globigerince may be similarly 
 derived; and if they were so, it would be much more 
 easy to understand how they obtain their supply of 
 food than it is at present. Nevertheless, the positive 
 and negative evidence all points the other way. The 
 skeletons of the full-grown, deep-sea Globigerince are 
 so remarkably solid and heavy in proportion to their 
 surface as to seem little fitted for floating; and, as a 
 matter of fact, they are not to be found along with the 
 Diatoms and Radiolaria, in the uppermost stratum of 
 the open ocean. 
 
 It has been observed, again, that the abundance of 
 Globigerinos, in proportion to other organisms, of like 
 kind, increases with the depth of the sea; and that 
 deep-water Globigerinas are larger than those which 
 live in shallower parts of the sea; and such facts nega-
 
 56 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 live the supposition that these organisms have been 
 swept by currents from the shallows into the deeps of 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these 
 wonderful creatures live and die at the depths in which 
 they are found. 
 
 However, the important points for us are, that the 
 living Globigerince are exclusively marine animals, the 
 skeletons of which abound at the bottom of deep seas ; 
 and that there is not a shadow of reason for believing 
 that the habits of the Globigerince of the chalk differed 
 from those of the existing species. But if this be true, 
 there is no escaping the conclusion that the chalk 
 itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep sea. 
 
 In working over the soundings collected by Captain 
 Dayman, I was surprised to find that many of what 
 I have called the "granules" of that mud, were not, 
 as one might have been tempted to think at first, the 
 mere powder and waste of Globigerince, but that they 
 had a definite form and size. I termed these bodies 
 " coccoliths," and doubted their organic nature. Dr. 
 Wallich verified my observation, and added the inter- 
 esting discovery, that, not unfrequently, bodies simi- 
 lar* to these " coccoliths " were aggregated together into 
 spheroids, which he termed " coccosptwres." So far as 
 we knew, these bodies, the nature of which is ex- 
 tremely puzzling and problematical, were peculiar to 
 the Atlantic soundings. 
 
 But, a few years ago, Mr. Sorby, in making a care- 
 ful examination of the chalk by means of thin sections 
 and otherwise, observed, as Ehrenberg had done be- 
 fore him, that much of its granular basis possesses a 
 definite form. Comparing these formed particles 
 with those in the Atlantic soundings, he found the two
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 57 
 
 to be identical; and thus proved that the chalk, like 
 the soundings, contains these mysterious coccoliths 
 and coccospheres. Here was a further and a most in- 
 teresting confirmation, from internal evidence, of the 
 essential identity of the chalk with modern deep-sea 
 mud. Globigerince, coccoliths, and coccospheres are 
 found as the chief constituents of both, and testify to 
 the general similarity of the conditions under which 
 both have been formed. 
 
 The evidence furnished by the hewing, facing, and 
 superposition of the stones of the Pyramids, that these 
 structures were built by men, has no greater weight 
 than the evidence that the chalk was built by Globi- 
 gerince ; and the belief that those ancient pyramid- 
 builders were terrestrial and air-breathing creatures 
 like ourselves, is it not better based than the conviction 
 that the chalk-makers lived in the sea? 
 
 But as our belief in the building of the Pyramids by 
 men is not only grounded on the internal evidences 
 afforded by these structures, but gathers strength from 
 multitudinous collateral proofs, and is clinched by the 
 total absence of any reason for a contrary belief; so 
 the evidence drawn from the Globigerince that the 
 chalk is an ancient sea-bottom, is fortified by innumer- 
 able independent lines of evidence; and our belief in 
 the truth of the conclusion to which all positive testi- 
 mony tends, receives the like negative justification from 
 the fact that no other hypothesis has a shadow of 
 foundation. 
 
 It may be worth while briefly to consider a few of 
 these collateral proofs that the chalk was deposited 
 at the bottom of the sea. 
 
 The great mass of the chalk is composed, as we have 
 seen, of the skeletons of Globigerina, and other simple
 
 58 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 organisms, imbedded in granular matter. Here and 
 there, however, this hardened mud of the ancient sea 
 reveals the remains of higher animals which have lived 
 and died, and left their hard parts in the mud, just as 
 the oysters die and leave their shells behind them, in 
 the mud of the present seas. 
 
 There are, at the present day, certain groups of 
 animals which are never found in fresh waters, being 
 unable to live anywhere but in the sea. Such are the 
 corals ; those corallines which are called Polycoa ; those 
 creatures which fabricate the lamp-shells, and are 
 called Brachiopoda ; the pearly Nautilus, and all ani- 
 mals allied to it ; and all the forms of sea-urchins and 
 star-fishes. 
 
 Not only are all these creatures confined to salt 
 water at the present day ; but, so far as our records of 
 the past go, the conditions of their existence have been 
 the same : hence, their occurrence in any deposit is as 
 strong evidence as can be obtained, that that deposit 
 was formed in the sea. Now the remains of animals of 
 all the kinds which have been enumerated, occur in 
 the chalk, in greater or less abundance; while not one 
 of those forms of shell-fish which are characteristic of 
 fresh water has yet been observed in it. 
 
 When we consider that the remains of more than 
 three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals have 
 been discovered among the fossils of the chalk, that 
 the great majority of them are of such forms as are 
 now met with only in the sea, and that there is no rea- 
 son to believe that any one of them inhabited fresh 
 water the collateral evidence that the chalk repre- 
 sents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force 
 as the proof derived from the nature of the chalk it- 
 self. I think you will now allow that I did not over-
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 59 
 
 state my case when I asserted that we have as strong 
 grounds for believing that all the vast area of dry land, 
 at present occupied by the chalk, was once at the bot- 
 tom of the sea, as we have for any matter of history 
 whatever; while there is no justification for any other 
 belief. 
 
 No less certain it is that the time during which the 
 countries we now call south-east England, France, 
 Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, were 
 more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was of 
 considerable duration. 
 
 We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, 
 more than a thousand feet thick. I think you will agree 
 with me, that it must have taken some time for the 
 skeletons of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch 
 in diameter to heap up such a mass as that. I have 
 said that throughout the thickness of the chalk the 
 remains of other animals are scattered. These re- 
 mains are often in the most exquisite state of preser- 
 vation. The valves of the shell-fishes are commonly 
 adherent; the long spines of some of the sea-urchins, 
 which would be detached by the smallest jar, often 
 remain in their places. In a word, it is certain that 
 these animals have lived and died when the place 
 which they now occupy was the surface of as much of 
 the chalk as had then been deposited; and that each 
 has been covered up by the layer of Globigerina mud, 
 upon which the creatures imbedded a little higher up 
 have, in like manner, lived and died. But some of these 
 remains prove the existence of reptiles of vast size in 
 the chalk sea. These lived their time, and had their 
 ancestors and descendants, which assuredly implies 
 time, reptiles being of slow growth. 
 
 There is more curious evidence, again, that the pro-
 
 60 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 cess of covering up, or, in other words, the deposit of 
 Globigerina skeletons, did not go on very fast. It is 
 demonstrable that an animal of the cretaceous sea 
 might die, that its skeleton might lie Mncovered upon 
 the sea-bottom long enough to lose all its outward cover- 
 ings and appendages by putrefaction; and that, after 
 this had happened, another animal might attach itself 
 to the dead and naked skeleton, might grow to matu- 
 rity, and might itself die before the calcareous mud 
 had buried the whole. 
 
 Cases of this kind are admirably described by Sir 
 Charles Lyell. He speaks of the frequency with which 
 geologists find in the chalk a fossilized sea-urchin, to 
 which is attached the lower valve of a Crania. This is 
 a kind of shell-fish, with a shell composed of two 
 pieces, of which, as in the oyster, one is fixed and the 
 other free. 
 
 "The upper valve is almost invariably wanting, 
 though occasionally found in a perfect state of pre- 
 servation in the white chalk at some distance. In this 
 case, we see clearly that the sea-urchin first lived from 
 youth to age, then died and lost its spines, which were 
 carried away. Then the young Crania adhered to the 
 bared shell, grew and perished in its turn ; after which, 
 the upper valve was separated from the lower, before 
 the Echinus became enveloped in chalky mud." 
 
 A specimen in the Museum of Practical Geology, in 
 London, still further prolongs the period which must 
 have elapsed between the death of the sea-urchin, and 
 its burial by the Globigerince. For the outward face of 
 the valve of a Crania, which is attached to a sea-urchin 
 (Micraster), is itself overrun by an incrusting coralline, 
 which spreads thence over more or less of the surface 
 of the sea-urchin. It follows that, after the upper
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 61 
 
 valve of the Crania fell off, the surface of the attached 
 valve must have remained exposed long enough to 
 allow of the growth of the whole corraline, since coral- 
 lines do not live imbedded in mud. 
 
 The progress of knowledge may, one day, enable us 
 to deduce from such facts as these the maximum rate 
 at which the chalk can have accumulated, and thus to 
 arrive at the minimum duration of the chalk period. 
 Suppose that the valve of the Crania upon which a 
 coralline has fixed itself in the way just described, is so 
 attached to the sea-urchin that no part of it is more 
 than an inch above the face upon which the sea-urchin 
 rests. Then, as the coralline could not have fixed itself, 
 if the Crania had been covered up with chalk mud, 
 and could not have lived had itself been so covered 
 it follows, that an inch of chalk mud could not have 
 accumulated within the time between the death and 
 decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin and the growth 
 of the coralline to the full size which it has attained. 
 If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin; the 
 attachment, growth to maturity, and decay of the 
 Crania; and the subsequent attachment and growth 
 of the coralline, took a year (which is a low estimate 
 enough), the accumulation of the inch of chalk must 
 have taken more than a year: and the deposit of a 
 thousand feet of chalk must, consequently, have taken 
 more than twelve thousand years. 
 
 The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, 
 a knowledge of the length of time the Crania and the 
 coralline needed to attain their full size; and, on this 
 head, precise knowledge is at present wanting. But 
 there are circumstances which tend to show, that 
 nothing like an inch of chalk has accumulated during 
 the life of a Crania ; and, on any probable estimate of
 
 62 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 the length of that life, the chalk period must have had 
 a much longer duration than that thus roughly as- 
 signed to it. 
 
 Thus, not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud 
 of an ancient sea-bottom; but it is no less certain, that 
 the chalk sea existed during an extremely long period, 
 though we may not be prepared to give a precise esti- 
 mate of the length of that period in years. The relative 
 duration is clear, though the absolute duration may 
 not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise 
 date to the period at which the chalk sea began, or 
 ended, its existence, is baffled by difficulties of the same 
 kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may 
 be determined with as great ease and certainty as the 
 long duration of that epoch. 
 
 You will have heard of the interesting discoveries 
 recently made, in various parts of Western Europe, of 
 flint implements, obviously worked into shape by hu- 
 man hands, under circumstances which show conclu- 
 sively that man is a very ancient denizen of these re- 
 gions. 
 
 It has been proved that the old populations of 
 Europe, whose existence has been revealed to us in 
 this way, consisted of savages, such as the Esquimaux 
 are now ; that, in the country which is now France, they 
 hunted the reindeer, and were familiar with the ways 
 of the mammoth and the bison. The physical geography 
 of France was in those days different from what it 
 is now the river Somme, for instance, having cut 
 its bed a hundred feet deeper between that time and 
 this; and, it is probable, that the climate was more like 
 that of Canada or Siberia, than that of Western 
 Europe.
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 63 
 
 The existence of these people is forgotten even in 
 the traditions of the oldest historical nations. The name 
 and fame of them had utterly vanished until a few 
 years back ; and the amount of physical change which 
 has been effected since their day, renders it more than 
 probable that, venerable as are some of the historical 
 nations, the workers of the chipped flints of Hoxne or 
 of Amiens are to them, as they are to us, in point of 
 antiquity. 
 
 But, if we assign to these hoar relics of long- vanished 
 generations of men the greatest age that can possibly 
 be claimed for them, they are not older than the drift, 
 or boulder clay, which, in comparison with the chalk, 
 is but a very juvenile deposit. You need go no further 
 than your own sea-board for evidence of this fact. At 
 one of the most charming spots on the coast of Nor- 
 folk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay forming a 
 vast mass, which lies upon the chalk, and must con- 
 sequently have come into existence after it. Huge 
 boulders of chalk are, in fact, included in the clay, and 
 have evidently been brought to the position they now 
 occupy, by the same agency as that which has planted 
 blocks of syenite from Norway side by side with them. 
 
 The chalk, then, is certainly older than the boulder 
 clay. If you ask how much, I will again take you no 
 further than the same spot upon your own coasts for 
 evidence. I have spoken of the boulder clay and drift 
 as resting upon the chalk. That is not strictly true. 
 Interposed between the chalk and the drift is a com- 
 paratively insignificant layer, containing vegetable 
 matter. But that layer tells a wonderful history. It is 
 full of stumps of trees standing as they grew. Fir- 
 trees are there with their cones, and hazel-bushes with 
 their nuts ; there stand the stools of oak and yew trees,
 
 64 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 beeches and alders. Hence this stratum is appropriately 
 called the "forest-bed." 
 
 It is obvious that the chalk must have been up- 
 heaved and converted into dry land, before the timber 
 trees could grow upon it. As the boles of some of these 
 trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is no less 
 clear that the dry land this formed remained in the 
 same condition for long ages. And not only do the re- 
 mains of stately oaks and well-grown firs testify to the 
 duration of this condition of things, but additional evi- 
 dence to the same effect is afforded by the abundant 
 remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotomuses 
 and other great wild beasts, which it has yielded to the 
 zealous search of such men as the Rev. Mr. Gunn. 
 
 When you look at such a collection as he has formed, 
 and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veri- 
 tably carry their owners about, and these great grinders 
 crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed is 
 now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they 
 are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual 
 rings of the tree-stumps. 
 
 Thus there is a writing upon the walls of cliffs at 
 Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us, with 
 an authority which cannot be impeached, that the 
 ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and 
 remained dry land, until it was covered with forest, 
 stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced 
 your geologists. How long it remained in that condi- 
 tion cannot be said ; but " the whirligig of time brought 
 its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, 
 with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived 
 elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and 
 dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the 
 bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 65 
 
 of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the wal- 
 rus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about 
 where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of 
 the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we 
 know not, but at length it came to an end. The up- 
 heaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern 
 Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the 
 beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at 
 length what we call the history of England dawned. 
 
 Thus you have within the limits of your own 
 county, proof that the chalk can justly claim a very much 
 greater antiquity than even the oldest physical traces of 
 mankind. But we may go further and demonstrate, 
 by evidence of the same authority as that which testi- 
 fies to the existence of the father of men, that the 
 chalk is vastly older than Adam himself. 
 
 The Book of Genesis informs us that Adam, imme- 
 diately upon his creation, and before the appearance 
 of Eve, was placed in the Garden of Eden. The prob- 
 lem of the geographical position of Eden has greatly 
 vexed the spirits of the learned in such matters, but 
 there is one point respecting which, so far as I know, 
 no commentator has ever raised a doubt. This is, 
 that of the four rivers which are said to run out of 
 it, Euphrates and Hiddekel are identical with the 
 rivers now known by the names of Euphrates and 
 Tigris. 
 
 But the whole country in which these mighty rivers 
 take their origin, and through which they run, is com- 
 posed of rocks which are either of the same age as the 
 chalk, or of later date. So that the chalk must not only 
 have been formed, but, after its formation, the time 
 required for the deposit of these later rocks, and for 
 their upheaval into dry land, must have elapsed, before
 
 66 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 the smallest brook which feeds the swift stream of 
 " the great river, the river of Babylon," began to flow. 
 
 Thus, evidence which cannot be rebutted, and which 
 need not be strengthened, though if time permitted 
 I might indefinitely increase its quantity, compels you 
 to believe that the earth, from the time of the chalk to 
 the present day, has been the theatre of a series of 
 changes as vast in their amount, as they were slow 
 in their progress. The area on which we stand has been 
 first sea and then land, for at least four alternations; 
 and has remained in each of these conditions for a 
 period of great length. 
 
 Nor have these wonderful metamorphoses of sea 
 into land, and of land into sea, been confined to one 
 corner of England. During the chalk period, or "cre- 
 taceous epoch," not one of the present great physical 
 features of the globe was in existence. Our great moun- 
 tain ranges, Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, have 
 all been upheaved since the chalk was deposited, and 
 the cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and 
 Ararat. 
 
 All this is certain, because rocks of cretaceous, or 
 still later, date have shared in the elevatory move- 
 ments which gave rise to these mountain chains; and 
 may be found perched up, in some cases, many thou- 
 sand feet high upon their flanks. And evidence of equal 
 cogency demonstrates that, though, in Norfolk, the 
 forest-bed rests directly upon the chalk, yet it does so, 
 not because the period at which the forest grew imme- 
 diately followed that at which the chalk was formed, 
 but because an immense lapse of time, represented 
 elsewhere by thousands of feet of rock, is not indicated 
 at Cromer.
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 67 
 
 I must ask you to believe that there is no less con- 
 clusive proof that a still more prolonged succession of 
 similar changes occurred, before the chalk was de- 
 posited. Nor have we any reason to think that the 
 first term in the series of these changes is known. The 
 oldest sea-beds preserved to us are sands, and mud, 
 and pebbles, the wear and tear of rocks which were 
 formed in still older oceans. 
 
 But, great as is the magnitude of these physical 
 changes of the world, they have been accompanied by 
 a no less striking series of modifications in its living 
 inhabitants. 
 
 All the great classes of animals, beasts of the field, 
 fowls of the air, creeping things, and things which 
 dwell in the waters, flourished upon the globe long ages 
 before the chalk was deposited. Very few, however, 
 if any, of these ancient forms of animal life were iden- 
 tical with those which now live. Certainly not one of 
 the higher animals was of the same species as any of 
 those now in existence. The beasts of the field, in the 
 days before the chalk, were not our beasts of the field, 
 nor the fowls of the air such as those which the eye 
 of men has seen flying, unless his antiquity dates in- 
 finitely further back than we at present surmise. If 
 we could be carried back into those times, we should be 
 as one suddenly set down in Australia before it was 
 colonized. We should see mammals, birds, reptiles, 
 fishes, insects, snails, and the like, clearly recognisable 
 as such, and yet not one of them would be just the 
 same as those with which we are familiar, and many 
 would be extremely different. 
 
 From that time to the present, the population of 
 the world has undergone slow and gradual, but inces- 
 sant changes. There has been no grand catastrophe
 
 68 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 no destroyer has swept away the forms of life of one 
 period, and replaced them by a totally new creation ; 
 but one species has vanished and another has taken 
 its place ; creatures of one type of structure have di- 
 minished, those of another have increased, as time 
 has passed on. And thus, while the differences be- 
 tween the living creatures of the time before the chalk 
 and those of the present day appear startling, if placed 
 side by side, we are led from one to the other by the 
 most gradual progress, if we follow the course of Na- 
 ture through the whole series of those relics of her 
 operations which she has left behind. 
 
 And it is by the population of the chalk sea that the 
 ancient and the modern inhabitants of the world are 
 most completely connected. The groups which are 
 dying out flourish, side by side, with the groups which 
 are now the dominant forms of life. 
 
 Thus the chalk contains remains of those strange 
 flying and swimming reptiles, the pterodactyl, the ich- 
 thyosaurus, and the plesiosaurus, which are found in no 
 later deposits, but abounded in preceding ages. The 
 chambered shells called ammonites and belemnites, 
 which are so characteristic of the period preceding 
 the cretaceous, in like manner die with it. 
 
 But, amongst these fading remainders of a previous 
 state of things, are some very modern forms of life, 
 looking like Yankee pedlars among a tribe of Red 
 Indians. Crocodiles of modern type appear; bony 
 fishes, many of them very similar to existing species 
 almost supplant the forms of fish which predominate 
 in more ancient seas; and many kinds of living shell- 
 fish first become known to us in the chalk. The vege- 
 tation acquires a modern aspect. A few living animals 
 are not even distinguishable as species, from those
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 69 
 
 which existed at that remote epoch. The Globige- 
 rina of the present day, for example, is not different 
 specifically from that of the chalk ; and the same may 
 be said of many other Foraminifera. I think it prob- 
 able that critical and unprejudiced examination will 
 show that more than one species of much higher ani- 
 mals have had a similar longevity; but the only ex- 
 ample, which I can at present give confidently is the 
 snake's-head lamp-shell (Terebratulina caput serpentis) , 
 which lives in our English seas and abounded (as Tere- 
 bratulina striata of authors) in the chalk. 
 
 The longest line of human ancestry must hide its 
 diminished head before the pedigree of this insignifi- 
 cant shell-fish. We Englishmen are proud to have an 
 ancestor who was present at the Battle of Hastings. 
 The ancestors of Terebratulina caput serpentis may 
 have been present at a battle of Ichthyosauria in that 
 part of the sea which, when the chalk was forming, 
 flowed over the site of Hastings. While all around has 
 changed, this Terebratulina has peacefully propagated 
 its species from generation to generation, and stands 
 to this day, as a living testimony to the continuity of 
 the present with the past history of the globe. 
 
 Up to this moment I have stated, so far as I know, 
 nothing but well-authenticated facts, and the imme- 
 diate conclusions which they force upon the mind. 
 
 But the mind is so constituted that it does not wil- 
 lingly rest in facts and immediate causes, but seeks 
 always after a knowledge of the remoter links in the 
 chain of causation. 
 
 Taking the many changes of any given spot of the 
 earth's surface, from sea to land and from land to sea, 
 as an established fact, we cannot refrain from asking
 
 70 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 ourselves how these changes have occurred. And when 
 we have explained them as they must be explained 
 by the alternate slow movements of elevation and 
 depression which have affected the crust of the earth, 
 we go still further back, and ask, Why these move- 
 ments ? 
 
 I am not certain that any one can give you a satis- 
 factory answer to that question. Assuredly I cannot. 
 All that can be said, for certain, is, that such move- 
 ments are part of the ordinary course of nature, inas- 
 much as they are going on at the present time. Direct 
 proof may be given, that some parts of the land of the 
 northern hemisphere are at this moment insensibly 
 rising and others insensibly sinking; and there is in- 
 direct, but perfectly satisfactory, proof, that an enor- 
 mous area now covered by the Pacific has been deep- 
 ened thousands of feet, since the present inhabitants 
 of that sea came into existence. 
 
 Thus there is not a shadow of a reason for believ- 
 ing that the physical changes of the globe, in past times 
 have been effected by other than natural causes. 
 
 Is there any more reason for believing that the 
 concomitant modifications in the forms of the living 
 inhabitants of the globe have been brought about in 
 other ways ? 
 
 Before attempting to answer this question, let us try 
 to form a distinct mental picture of what has happened, 
 in some special case. 
 
 The crocodiles are animals which, as a group, have 
 a very vast antiquity. They abounded ages before the 
 chalk was deposited ; they throng the rivers in warm 
 climates, at the present day. There is a difference in 
 the form of the joints of the back-bone, and in some 
 minor particulars, between the crocodiles of the present
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 71 
 
 epoch and those which lived before the chalk; but, in 
 the cretaceous epoch, as I have already mentioned, the 
 crocodiles had assumed the modern type of structure. 
 Notwithstanding this, the crocodiles of the chalk are 
 not identically the same as those which lived in the 
 times called "older tertiary," which succeeded the 
 cretaceous epoch; and the crocodiles of the older 
 tertiaries are not identical with those of the newer 
 tertiaries, nor are these identical with existing forms. 
 I leave open the question whether particular species 
 may have lived on from epoch to epoch. But each 
 epoch has had its peculiar crocodiles; though all, 
 since the chalk, have belonged to the modern type, and 
 differ simply in their proportions, and in such struc- 
 tural particulars as are discernible only to trained eyes. 
 
 How is the existence of this long succession of dif- 
 ferent species of crocodiles to be accounted for? 
 
 Only two suppositions seem to be open to us 
 Either each species of crocodile has been specially 
 created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form 
 by the operation of natural causes. 
 
 Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I 
 can find no warranty for believing in the distinct crea- 
 tion of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the 
 course of countless ages of time. Science gives no coun- 
 tenance to such a wild fancy; nor can even the per- 
 verse ingenuity of a commentator pretend to discover 
 this sense, in the simple words in which the writer of 
 Genesis records the proceedings of the fifth and sixth 
 days of the Creation. 
 
 On the other hand, I see no good reason for doubt- 
 ing the necessary alternative, that all these varied 
 species have been evolved from pre-existing crocodilian 
 forms, by the operation of causes as completely a part
 
 72 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 of the common order of nature, as those which have 
 effected the changes of the inorganic world. 
 
 Few will venture to affirm that the reasoning which 
 applies to crocodiles loses its force among other ani- 
 mals, or among plants. If one series of species has 
 come into existence by the operation of natural causes, 
 it seems folly to deny that all may have arisen in the 
 same way. 
 
 A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I 
 were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into 
 the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it 
 would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that 
 this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what 
 has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fer- 
 vent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has 
 become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the 
 abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken 
 some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the 
 shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land 
 and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms as- 
 sumed by living beings, we have observed nothing 
 but the natural product of the forces originally pos- 
 sessed by the substance of the universe.
 
 THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 I KNOW quite well that launching myself into this 
 discussion is a very dangerous operation; that it is a 
 very large subject, and one which is difficult to deal 
 with, however much I may trespass upon your patience 
 in the time allotted to me. But the discussion is so 
 fundamental, it is so completely impossible to make up 
 one's mind on these matters until one has settled the 
 question, that I will even venture to make the experi- 
 ment. A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a 
 former age I mean Francis Bacon said that truth 
 came out of error much more rapidly than it came out 
 of confusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. 
 Next to being right in this world, the best of all things 
 is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will 
 come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between 
 right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come 
 out nowhere ; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly 
 and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, 
 have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head 
 against a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So 
 I will not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or 
 wrong in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hope 
 to be clear and definite; and then you will be able to 
 judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train 
 of thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads 
 against facts or not.
 
 74 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 I take it that the whole object of education is, in the 
 first place, to train the faculties of the young in such a 
 manner as to give their possessors the best chance of 
 being happy and useful in their generation ; and, in the 
 second place, to furnish them with the most important 
 portions of that immense capitalised experience of the 
 human race Avhich we call knowledge of various kinds. 
 I am using the term knowledge in its widest possible 
 sense; and the question is, what subjects to select by 
 training and discipline, in which the object I have just 
 defined may be best attained. 
 
 I must call your attention further to this fact, that all 
 the subjects of our thoughts all feelings and propo- 
 sitions (leaving aside our sensations as the mere mate- 
 rials and occasions of thinking and feeling), all our 
 mental furniture may be classified under one of two 
 heads as either within the province of the intellect, 
 something that can be put into propositions and af- 
 firmed or denied ; or as within the province of feeling, 
 or that which, before the name was defiled, was called 
 the aesthetic side of our nature, and which can neither 
 be proved nor disproved, but only felt and known. 
 
 According to the classification which I have put be- 
 fore you, then, the subjects of all knowledge are divisi- 
 ble into the two groups, matters of science and matters 
 of art ; for all things with which the reasoning faculty 
 alone is occupied, come under the province of science; 
 and in the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and 
 technical sense in which we are now accustomed to use 
 the word art, all things feelable, all things which stir 
 our emotions, come under the term of art, in the sense 
 of the subject-matter of the aesthetic faculty. So that 
 we are shut up to this that the business of education 
 is, in the first place, to provide the young with the
 
 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 75 
 
 means and the habit of observation ; and, secondly, to 
 supply the subject-matter of knowledge either in the 
 shape of science or of art, or of both combined. 
 
 Now, it is a very remarkable fact but it is true of 
 most things in this world that there is hardly any- 
 thing one-sided, or of one nature; and it is not imme- 
 diately obvious what of the things that interest us may 
 be regarded as pure science, and what may be regarded 
 as pure art. It may be that there are some peculiarly 
 constituted persons who, before they have advanced 
 far into the depths of geometry, find artistic beauty 
 about it; but, taking the generality of mankind, I think 
 it may be said that, when they begin to learn mathe- 
 matics, their whole souls are absorbed in tracing the 
 connection between the premisses and the conclusion, 
 and that to them geometry is pure science. So I think 
 it may be said that mechanics and osteology are pure 
 science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure 
 art. You cannot reason about it ; there is no proposition 
 involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an ara- 
 besque, or a "harmony in grey," touches none but the 
 aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, and even 
 many persons who are not great mathematicians, will 
 tell you that they derive immense pleasure from geo- 
 metrical reasonings. Everybody knows mathema- 
 ticians speak of solutions and problems as "elegant," 
 and they tell you that a certain mass of mystic symbols 
 is "beautiful, quite lovely." Well, you do not see it. 
 They do see it, because the intellectual process, the 
 process of comprehending the reasons symbolised by 
 these figures and these signs, confers upon them a sort 
 of pleasure, such as an artist has in visual symmetry. 
 Take a science of which I may speak with more con- 
 fidence, and which is the most attractive of those I am
 
 76 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 concerned with. It is what we call morphology, which 
 Consists in tracing out the unity in variety of the in- 
 finitely diversified structures of animals and plants. I 
 cannot give you any example of a thorough aesthetic 
 pleasure more intensely real than a pleasure of this 
 kind the pleasure which arises in one's mind when 
 a whole mass of different structures run into one har- 
 mony as the expression of a central law. That is where 
 the province of art overlays and embraces the province 
 of intellect. And, if I may venture to express an opinion 
 on such a subject, the great majority of forms of art are 
 not in the sense what I just now defined them to be 
 pure art; but they derive much of their quality from 
 simultaneous and even unconscious excitement of the 
 intellect. 
 
 When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I 
 am so now ; and it so happened that I had the oppor- 
 tunity of hearing much good music. Among other 
 things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that 
 great old master, Sebastian Bach. I remember per- 
 fectly well though I knew nothing about music then, 
 and, I may add, know nothing whatever about it now 
 the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in 
 listening, by the hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is 
 a pleasure which remains with me, I am glad to think; 
 but, of late years, I have tried to find out the why and 
 wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the 
 pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind 
 is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived 
 from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely 
 intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is 
 exactly the same as in most of my problems in morpho- 
 1& V that you have the theme in one of the old mas- 
 ter's works followed out in all its endless variations,
 
 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 77 
 
 always appearing and always reminding you of unity 
 in variety. So in painting; what is called "truth to 
 nature" is the intellectual element coming in, and 
 truth to nature depends entirely upon the intellectual 
 culture of the person to whom art is addressed. If you 
 are in Australia, you may get credit for being a good 
 artist I mean among the natives if you can draw 
 a kangaroo after a fashion. But, among men of higher 
 civilisation, the intellectual knowledge we possess 
 brings its criticism into our appreciation of works of 
 art, and we are obliged to satisfy it, as well as the mere 
 sense of beauty in colour and in outline. And so, the 
 higher the culture and information of those whom art 
 addresses, the more exact and precise must be what we 
 call its "truth to nature." 
 
 If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and 
 you find works of literature which may be said to be 
 pure art. A little song of Shakespeare or of Goethe is 
 pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful, although its intel- 
 lectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures is 
 made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, 
 and the effect is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the 
 great mass of the literature we esteem is valued, not 
 merely because of having artistic form, but because of 
 its intellectual content; and the value is the higher the 
 more precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual con- 
 tent. And, if you will let me for a moment speak of the 
 very highest forms of literature, do we not regard them 
 as highest simply because the more we know the truer 
 they seem, and the more competent we are to appre- 
 ciate beauty the more beautiful they are ? No man ever 
 understands Shakespeare until he is old, though the 
 youngest may admire him, the reason being that he 
 satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest and har-
 
 78 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 monises with the ripest and richest experience of the 
 oldest. 
 
 I have said this much to draw your attention to what, 
 in my mind, lies at the root of all this matter, and at the 
 understanding of one another by the men of science on 
 the one hand, and the men of literature, and history, 
 and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one 
 order of study or another should predominate. It is a 
 question of what topics of education you shall select 
 which will combine all the needful elements in such due 
 proportion as to give the greatest amount of food, sup- 
 port, and encouragement to those faculties which en- 
 able us to appreciate truth, and to profit by those 
 sources of innocent happiness which are open to us, and, 
 at the same time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, 
 and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls 
 and dangers which beset those who break through the 
 natural or moral laws. 
 
 I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration 
 of the question of the value of purely literary education. 
 Is it good and sufficient, or is it insufficient and bad ? 
 Well, here I venture to say that there are literary educa- 
 tions and literary educations. If I am to understand by 
 that term the education that was current in the great 
 majority of middle-class schools, and upper schools 
 too, in this country when I was a boy, and which con- 
 sisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys 
 for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and 
 Greek grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek 
 authors, and possibly making verses which, had they 
 been English verses, would have been condemned as 
 abominable doggerel, if that is what you mean by 
 liberal education, then I say it is scandalously insuffi- 
 cient and almost worthless. My reason for saying so
 
 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 79 
 
 is not from the point of view of science at all, but from 
 the point of view of literature. I say the thing professes 
 to be literary education that is not a literary education 
 at all. It was not literature at all that was taught, but 
 science in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that 
 grammar is science and not literature. The analysis of 
 a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as 
 much a scientific operation as the analysis of a chemi- 
 cal compound by the help of the rules of chemical analy- 
 sis. There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic fac- 
 ulty in that operation ; and I ask multitudes of men of 
 my own age, who went through this process, whether 
 they ever had a conception of art or literature until 
 they obtained it for themselves after leaving school? 
 Then you may say, " If that is so, if the education was 
 scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it ? " I say, 
 because although it is a scientific training, it is of the 
 most inadequate and inappropriate kind. If there is 
 any good at all in scientific education it is that men 
 should be trained, as I said before, to know things for 
 themselves at first hand, and that they should under- 
 stand every step of the reason of that which they do. 
 
 I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that 
 science philology of which grammar is a part 
 and parcel ; yet everybody knows that grammar, as it 
 is usually learned at school, affords no scientific train- 
 ing. It is taught just as you would teach the rules of 
 chess or draughts. On the other hand, if I am to under- 
 stand by a literary education the study of the literatures 
 of either ancient or modern nations but especially 
 those of antiquity, and especially that of ancient Greece ; 
 if this literature is studied, not merely from the point of 
 view of philological science, and its practical applica- 
 tion to the inteipretation of texts, but as an exempli-
 
 80 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 fication of and commentary upon the principles of art; 
 if you look upon the literature of a people as a chapter 
 in the development of the human mind, if you work out 
 this in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references 
 to morals and politics, and physical geography, and 
 the like as are needful to make you comprehend what 
 the meaning of ancient literature and civilisation is, 
 then, assuredly, it affords a splendid and noble educa- 
 tion. But I still think it is susceptible of improvement, 
 and that no man will ever comprehend the real secret 
 of the difference between the ancient world and our 
 present time, unless he has learned to see the difference 
 which the late development of physical science has 
 made between the thought of this day and the thought 
 of that, and he will never see that difference, unless he 
 has some practical insight into some branches of physi- 
 cal science ; and you must remember that a literary ed- 
 ucation such as that which I have just referred to, is out 
 of the reach of those whose school life is cut short at 
 sixteen or seventeen. 
 
 But, you will say, all this is fault-finding; let us hear 
 what you have in the way of positive suggestion. Then 
 I am bound to tell you that, if I could make a clean 
 sweep of everything I am very glad I cannot because 
 I might, and probably should, make mistakes, but 
 if I could make a clean sweep of everything and start 
 afresh, I should, in the first place, secure that training 
 of the young in reading and writing, and in the habit 
 of attention and observation, both to that which is told 
 them, and that which they see, which everybody agrees 
 to. But in addition to that, I should make it absolutely 
 necessary for everybody, for a longer or shorter period, 
 to learn to draw. Now, you may say, there are some 
 people who cannot draw, however much they may be
 
 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 81 
 
 taught. I deny that in toto, because I never yet met 
 with anybody who could not learn to write. Writing 
 is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the same 
 attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, 
 depend upon it, there is nobody who cannot be made 
 to draw, more or less well. Do not misapprehend me. 
 I do not say for one moment you would make an artistic 
 draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You 
 may improve the natural faculty in that direction, but 
 you cannot make it ; but you can teach simple drawing, 
 and you will find it an implement of learning of ex- 
 treme value. I do not think its value can be exagger- 
 ated, because it gives you the means of training the 
 young in attention and accuracy, which are the two 
 things in which all mankind are more deficient than 
 in any other mental quality whatever. The whole of 
 my life has been spent in trying to give my proper at- 
 tention to things and to be accurate, and I have not 
 succeeded as well as I could wish ; and other people, I 
 am afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot 
 begin this habit too early, and I consider there is no- 
 thing of so great a value as the habit of drawing, to 
 secure those two desirable ends. 
 
 Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scien- 
 tific or aesthetic, of education, and I should naturally 
 have no question at all about teaching the elements 
 of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a 
 practical manner; but among scientific topics, using 
 the word scientific in the broadest sense, I would also 
 include the elements of the theory of morals and of that 
 of political and social life, which, strangely enough, it 
 never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I 
 would have the history of our own country, and of all 
 the influences which have been brought to bear upon it,
 
 82 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 with incidental geography, not as a mere chronicle of 
 reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the development 
 of the race, and the history of civilisation. 
 
 Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and disci- 
 pline, we have happily in the English language one of 
 the most magnificent storehouses of artistic beauty and 
 of models of literary excellence which exists in the 
 world at the present time. I have said before, and I 
 repeat it here, that if a man cannot get literary culture 
 of the highest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and 
 Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop 
 Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious 
 writers I say, if he cannot get it out of those writers 
 he cannot get it out of anything; and I would assuredly 
 devote a very large portion of the time of every English 
 child to the careful study of the models of English writ- 
 ing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, 
 and, what is still more important and still more neg- 
 lected, the habit of using that language with precision, 
 with force, and with art. I fancy we are almost the only 
 nation in the world who seem to think that composition 
 comes by nature. The French attend to their own 
 language, the Germans study theirs; but Englishmen 
 do not seem to think it is worth their while. Nor would 
 I fail to include, in the course of study I am sketch- 
 ing, translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of 
 the modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read 
 Homer in Greek; but if you don't happen to know 
 Greek, the next best thing we can do is to read as good 
 a translation of it as we have recently been furnished 
 with in prose. You won't get all you would get from the 
 original, but you may get a great deal ; and to refuse to 
 know this great deal because you cannot get all, seems 
 to be as sensible as for a hungry man to refuse bread
 
 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 83 
 
 because he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add 
 instruction in either music or painting, or, if the child 
 should be so unhappy, as sometimes happens, as to 
 have no faculty for either of those, and no possibility 
 of doing anything in any artistic sense with them, then 
 I would see what could be done with literature alone ; 
 but I would provide, in the fullest sense, for the devel- 
 opment of the aesthetic side of the mind. In my judg- 
 ment, those are all the essentials of education for an 
 English child. With that outfit, such as it might be 
 made in the time given to education which is within 
 the reach of nine-tenths of the population with that 
 outfit, an Englishman, within the limits of English life, 
 is fitted to go anywhere, to occupy the highest posi- 
 tions, to fill the highest offices of the State, and to be- 
 come distinguished in practical pursuits, in science, or 
 in art. For, if he have the opportunity to learn all those 
 things, and have his mind disciplined in the various 
 directions the teaching of those topics would have ne- 
 cessitated, then, assuredly, he will be able to pick up, on 
 his road through life, all the rest of the intellectual bag- 
 gage he wants. 
 
 If the educational time at our disposition were suffi- 
 cient, there are one or two things I would add to those 
 I have just now called the essentials ; and perhaps you 
 will be surprised to hear, though I hope you will not, 
 that I should add, not more science, but one, or, if pos- 
 sible, two languages. The knowledge of some other 
 language than one's own is, in fact, of singular intellec- 
 tual value. Many of the faults and mistakes of the 
 ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they 
 knew no language but their own, and were often led 
 into confusing the symbol with the thought which it 
 embodied. I think it is Locke who says that one-half
 
 84 PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 of the mistakes of philosophers have arisen from ques- 
 tions about words ; and one of the safest ways of deliver- 
 ing yourself from the bondage of words is, to know how 
 ideas look in words to which you are not accustomed. 
 That is one reason for the study of language; another 
 reason is, that it opens new fields in art and in science. 
 Another is the practical value of such knowledge ; and 
 yet another is this, that if your languages are properly 
 chosen, from the time of learning the additional lan- 
 guages you will know your own language better than 
 ever you did. So, I say, if the time given to education 
 permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it 
 is the key to nearly one-half of English and to all the 
 Romance languages; and German, because it is the key 
 to almost all the remainder of English, and helps you 
 to understand a race from whom most of us have 
 sprung, and who have a character and a literature of a 
 fateful force in the history of the world, such as prob- 
 ably has been allotted to those of no other people, 
 except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves. Beyond 
 these, the essential and the eminently desirable ele- 
 ments of all education, let each man take up his special 
 line the historian devote himself to his history, the 
 man of science to his science, the man of letters to his 
 culture of that kind, and the artist to his special pursuit. 
 
 Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more 
 than this : Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit ; let " sic cogi- 
 tavi" be the epilogue to what I have ventured to ad- 
 dress to you to-night.
 
 THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC 
 INVESTIGATION 
 
 THE method of scientific investigation is nothing 
 but the expression of the necessary mode of working 
 of the human mind. It is simply the mode at which all 
 phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and 
 exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the 
 same kind of difference, between the mental opera- 
 tions of a man of science and those of an ordinary per- 
 son, as there is between the operations and methods of 
 a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in com- 
 mon scales, and the operations of a chemist in perform- 
 ing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his 
 balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that 
 the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance 
 in the other, differ in the principles of their construction 
 or manner of working ; but the beam of one is set on an 
 infinitely finer axis* than the other, and of course turns 
 by the addition of a much smaller weight. 
 
 You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give 
 you some familiar example. You have all heard it re- 
 peated, I dare say, that men of science work by means 
 of induction and deduction, and that by the help of 
 these operations, they, in a sort of sense, wring from 
 Nature certain other things, which are called natural 
 laws, and causes, and that out of these, by some cunning 
 skill of their own, they build up hypotheses and theories. 
 And it is imagined by many, that the operations of the 
 common mind can be by no means compared with 
 these processes, and ihat they have to be acquired by a
 
 86 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 
 
 sort of special apprenticeship to the craft. To hear all 
 these large words, you would think that the mind of a 
 man of science must be constituted differently from that 
 of his fellow men ; but if you will not be frightened by 
 terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and 
 that all these terrible apparatus are being used by your- 
 selves every day and every hour of your lives. 
 
 There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's 
 plays, where the author makes the hero express un- 
 bounded delight on being told that he had been talking 
 prose during the whole of his life. In the same way, I 
 trust, that you will take comfort, and be delighted with 
 yourselves, on the discovery that you have been acting 
 on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy 
 during the same period. Probably there is not one here 
 who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set 
 in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very 
 same kind, though differing of course in degree, as that 
 which a scientific man goes through in tracing the 
 causes of natural phenomena. 
 
 A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify 
 this. Suppose you go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting 
 an apple, you take up one, and, on biting it, you 
 find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and 
 green. You take up another one, and that too is hard, 
 green, and sour. The shopman offers you a third; but, 
 before biting it, you examine it, and find that it is hard 
 and green, and you immediately say that you will not 
 have it, as it must be sour, like those that you have 
 already tried. 
 
 Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; 
 but if you will take the trouble to analyse and trace out 
 into its logical elements what has been done by the 
 mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place
 
 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 87 
 
 you have performed the operation of induction. You 
 found that, in two experiences, hardness and greenness 
 in apples went together with sourness. It was so in the 
 first case, and it was confirmed by the second. True, it 
 is a very small basis, but still it is enough to make an 
 induction from; you generalise the facts, and you ex- 
 pect to find sourness in apples where you get hardness 
 and greenness. You found upon that a general law 
 that all hard and green apples are sour; and that, so 
 far as it goes, is a perfect induction. Well, having got 
 your natural law in this way, when you are offered an- 
 other apple which you find is hard and green, you say, 
 "All hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard 
 and green, therefore this apple is sour." That train of 
 reasoning is what logicians call a syllogism, and has all 
 its various parts and terms, its major premiss, its 
 minor premiss and its conclusion. And, by the help of 
 further reasoning, which, if drawn out, would have to 
 be exhibited in two or three other syllogisms, you arrive 
 at your final determination, "I will not have that ap- 
 ple." So that, you see, you have, in the first place, 
 established a law by induction, and upon that you 
 have founded a deduction, and reasoned out the special 
 particular case. Well now, suppose, having got your 
 conclusion of the law, that at some time afterwards, 
 you are discussing the qualities of apples with a friend : 
 you will say to him, " It is a very curious thing, but 
 I find that all hard and green apples are sour ! " Your 
 friend says to you, " But how do you know that ?" You 
 at once reply, "Oh, because I have tried them over 
 and over again, and have always found them to be 
 so." Well, if we were talking science instead of com- 
 mon sense, we should call that an experimental verifi- 
 cation. And, if still opposed, you go further, and say,
 
 88 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 
 
 " I have heard from the people in Somersetshire and 
 Devonshire, where a large number of apples are 
 grown, that they have observed the same thing. It is 
 also found to be the case in Normandy, and in North 
 America. In short, I find it to be the universal experi- 
 ence of mankind wherever attention has been directed 
 to the subject." Whereupon, your friend, unless he is 
 a very unreasonable man, agrees with you, and is con- 
 vinced that you are quite right in the conclusion you 
 have drawn. He believes, although perhaps he does 
 not know he believes it, that the more extensive veri- 
 fications are, that the more frequently experiments 
 have been made, and results of the same kind arrived 
 at, that the more varied the conditions under which 
 the same results are attained, the more certain is the 
 ultimate conclusion, and he disputes the question no 
 further. He sees that the experiment has been tried 
 under all sorts of conditions, as to time, place, and 
 people, with the same result; and he says with you, 
 therefore, that the law you have laid down must be a 
 good one, and he must believe it. 
 
 In science we do the same thing ; the philosopher 
 exercises precisely the same faculties, though in a much 
 more delicate manner. In scientific inquiry it becomes 
 a matter of duty to expose a supposed law to every pos- 
 sible kind of verification, and to take care, moreover, 
 that this is done intentionally, and not left to a mere 
 accident, as in the case of the apples. And in science, 
 as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact 
 proportion to the absence of variation in the result of 
 our experimental verifications. For instance, if you let 
 go your grasp of an article you may have in your hand, 
 it will immediately fall to the ground. That is a very 
 common verification of one of the best established laws
 
 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 89 
 
 of nature that of gravitation. The method by which 
 men of science establish the existence of that law is ex- 
 actly the same as that by which we have established the 
 trivial proposition about the sourness of hard and green 
 apples. But we believe it in such an extensive, thor- 
 ough, and unhesitating manner because the universal 
 experience of mankind verifies it, and we can verify it 
 ourselves at any time ; and that is the strongest possible 
 foundation on which any natural law can rest. 
 
 So much, then, by way of proof that the method of 
 establishing laws in science is exactly the same as that 
 pursued in common life. Let us now turn to another 
 matter (though really it is but another phase of the 
 same question), and that is, the method by which, 
 from the relations of certain phenomena, we prove that 
 some stand in the position of causes towards the others. 
 
 I want to put the case clearly before you, and I will 
 therefore show you what I mean by another familiar 
 example. I will suppose that one of you, on coming 
 down in the morning to the parlor of your house, finds 
 that a tea-pot and some spoons which had been left in 
 the room on the previous evening are gone, the win- 
 dow is open, and you observe the mark of a dirty hand 
 on the window-frame, and perhaps, in addition to that, 
 you notice the impress of a hob-nailed shoe on the 
 gravel outside. All these phenomena have struck your 
 attention instantly, and before two seconds have passed 
 you say, " Oh, somebody has broken open the window, 
 entered the room, and run off with the spoons and the 
 tea-pot ! " That speech is out of your mouth in a mo- 
 ment. And you will probably add, " I know there has; 
 I am quite sure of it ! " You mean to say exactly what 
 you know; but in reality you are giving expression to 
 what is, in all essential particulars, an hypothesis. You
 
 90 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 
 
 do not know it at all ; it is nothing but an hypothesis 
 rapidly framed in your own mind. And it is an hypo- 
 thesis founded on a long train of inductions and de- 
 ductions. 
 
 What are those inductions and deductions, and how 
 have you got at this hypothesis ? You have observed 
 in the first place, that the window is open ; but by a train 
 of reasoning involving many inductions and deductions, 
 you have probably arrived long before at the general 
 law and a very good one it is that windows do not 
 open of themselves; and you therefore conclude that 
 something has opened the window. A second general 
 law that you have arrived at in the same way is, that 
 tea-pots and spoons do not go out of a window spon- 
 taneously, and you are satisfied that, as they are not 
 now where you left them, they have been removed. In 
 the third place, you look at the marks on the window- 
 sill, and the shoe-marks outside, and you say that in all 
 previous experience the former kind of mark has never 
 been produced by anything else but the hand of a 
 human being; and the same experience shows that no 
 other animal but man at present wears shoes with hob- 
 nails in them such as would produce the marks in the 
 gravel. I do not know, even if we could discover any 
 of those "missing links" that are talked about, that 
 they would help us to any other conclusion ! At any 
 rate the law which states our present experience is 
 strong enough for my present purpose. You next reach 
 the conclusion that, as these kind of marks have not 
 been left by any other animal than man, or are liable 
 to be formed in any other way than a man's hand and 
 shoe, the marks in question have been formed by a 
 man in that way. You have, further, a general law, 
 founded on observation and experience, and that, too s
 
 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 91 
 
 is, I am sorry to say, a very universal and unimpeacha- 
 ble one, that some men are thieves ; and you assume 
 at once from all these premisses and that is what 
 constitutes your hypothesis that the man who made 
 the marks outside and on the window-sill, opened the 
 window, got into the room, and stole your tea-pot and 
 spoons. You have now arrived at a vera causa ; you 
 have assumed a cause which, it is plain, is competent 
 to produce all the phenomena you have observed. 
 You can explain all these phenomena only by the hy- 
 pothesis of a thief. But that is a hypothetical conclu- 
 sion, of the justice of which you have no absolute proof 
 at all; it is only rendered highly probable by a series 
 of inductive and deductive reasonings. 
 
 I suppose your first action, assuming that you are a 
 man of ordinary common sense, and that you have es- 
 tablished this hypothesis to your own satisfaction, will 
 very likely be to go off for the police, and set them on 
 the track of the burglar, with the view to the recovery 
 of your property. But just as you are starting with this 
 object, some person comes in, and on learning what 
 you are about, says, " My good friend, you are going on 
 a great deal too fast. How do you know that the man 
 who really made the marks took the spoons ? It might 
 have been a monkey that took them, and the man may 
 have merely looked in afterwards." You would prob- 
 ably reply, "Well, that is all very well, but you see it 
 is contrary to all experience of the way tea-pots and 
 spoons are abstracted ; so that, at any rate, your hypo- 
 thesis is less probable than mine." While you are talk- 
 ing the thing over in this way, another friend arrives, 
 one of the good kind of people that I was talking of a 
 little while ago. And he might say, " Oh, my dear sir, 
 you are certainly going on a great deal too fast. You
 
 92 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 
 
 are most presumptuous. You admit that all these oc- 
 currences took place when you were fast asleep, at a 
 time when you could not possibly have known anything 
 about what was taking place. How do you know that 
 the laws of Nature are not suspended during the night ? 
 It may be that there has been some kind of super- 
 natural interference in this case." In point of fact, he 
 declares that your hypothesis is one of which you cannot 
 at all demonstrate the truth, and that you are by no 
 means sure that the laws of Nature are the same when 
 you are asleep as when you are awake. 
 
 Well, now, you cannot at the moment answer that 
 kind of reasoning. You feel that your worthy friend 
 has you somewhat at a disadvantage. You will feel 
 perfectly convinced in your own mind, however, that 
 you are quite right, and you say to him, "My good 
 friend, I can only be guided by the natural probabilities 
 of the case, and if you will be kind enough to stand 
 aside and permit me to pass, I will go and fetch the 
 police." Well, we will suppose that your journey is 
 successful, and that by good luck you meet with a 
 policeman; that eventually the burglar is found with 
 your property on his person, and the marks correspond 
 to his hand and to his boots. Probably any jury would 
 consider those facts a very good experimental verifica- 
 tion of your hypothesis, touching the cause of the ab- 
 normal phenomena observed in your parlor, and would 
 act accordingly. 
 
 Now, in this supposititious case, I have taken phe- 
 nomena of a very common kind, in order that you 
 might see what are the different steps in an ordinary 
 process of reasoning, if you will only take the trouble to 
 analyse it carefully. All the operations I have described, 
 you will see, are involved in the mind of any man of
 
 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 93 
 
 sense in leading him to a conclusion as to the course he 
 should take in order to make good a robbery and punish 
 the offender. I say that you are led, in that case, to your 
 conclusion by exactly the same train of reasoning as 
 that which a man of science pursues when he is en- 
 deavouring to discover the origin and laws of the most 
 occult phenomena. The process is, and always must 
 be, the same ; and precisely the same mode of reasoning 
 was employed by Newton and Laplace in their en- 
 deavours to discover and define the causes of the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own 
 common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The 
 only difference is, that the nature of the inquiry being 
 more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully 
 watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw 
 in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the 
 hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment 
 as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions 
 at which we may arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a 
 fallacy, great or small, is always of importance, and is 
 sure to be in the long run constantly productive of 
 mischievous if not fatal results. 
 
 Do not allow yourselves to be misled by the common 
 notion that an hypothesis is untrustworthy simply be- 
 cause it is an hypothesis. It is often urged, in respect 
 to some scientific conclusion, that, after all, it is only an 
 hypothesis. But what more have we to guide us in nine- 
 tenths of the most important affairs of daily life than 
 hypotheses, and often very ill-based ones ? So that in 
 science, where the evidence of an hypothesis is sub- 
 jected to the most rigid examination, we may rightlj 
 pursue the same course. You may have hypotheses, 
 and hypotheses. A man may say, if he likes, that the 
 moon is made of green cheese : that is an hypothesis.
 
 94 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 
 
 But another man, who has devoted a great deal of time 
 and attention to the subject, and availed himself of the 
 most powerful telescopes and the results of the observa- 
 tions of others, declares that in his opinion it is probably 
 composed of materials very simitar to those of which 
 our own earth is made up : and that is also only an hy- 
 pothesis. But I need not tell you that there is an enor- 
 mous difference in the value of the two hypotheses. 
 That one which is based on sound scientific knowledge 
 is sure to have a corresponding value ; and that which 
 is a mere hasty random guess is likely to have but little 
 value. Every great step in our progress in discovering 
 causes has been made in exactly the same way as that 
 which I have detailed to you. A person observing the 
 occurrence of certain facts and phenomena asks, nat- 
 urally enough, what process, what kind of operation 
 known to occur in Nature applied to the particular 
 case, will unravel and explain the mystery ? Hence you 
 have the scientific hypothesis ; and its value will be pro- 
 portionate to the care and completeness with which its 
 basis had been tested and verified. It is in these matters 
 as in the commonest affairs of practical life : the guess of 
 the fool will be folly, while the guess of the wise man 
 will contain wisdom. In all cases, you see that the value 
 of the result depends on the patience and faithfulness 
 with which the investigator applies to his hypothesis 
 every possible kind of verification.
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 IN order to make the title of this discourse generally 
 intelligible, I have translated the term "Protoplasm," 
 which is the scientific name of the substance of which 
 I am about to speak, by the words " the physical basis 
 of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is 
 such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may 
 be novel so widely spread is the conception of life as 
 a something which works through matter, but is in- 
 dependent of it; and even those who are aware that 
 matter and life are inseparably connected, may not 
 be prepared for the conclusion plainly suggested by 
 the phrase, " the physical basis or matter of life," that 
 there is some one kind of matter which is common to 
 all living beings, and that their endless diversities are 
 bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, 
 unity. In fact, when first apprehended, such a doc- 
 trine as this appears almost shocking to common 
 sense. 
 
 What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different 
 from one another, in faculty, in form, and in substance, 
 than the various kinds of living beings? What com- 
 munity of faculty can there be between the bright- 
 coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere 
 mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, 
 and the painter, to whom it is instinct with beauty, or 
 the botanist, whom it feeds with knowledge? 
 
 Again, think of the microscopic fungus a mere 
 infinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and du- 
 ration enough to multiply into countless millions in the
 
 96 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 body of a living fly ; and then of the wealth of foliage, 
 the luxuriance of flower and fruit, which lies between 
 this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of Califor- 
 nia, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or 
 the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound 
 shadow, and endures while nations and empires come 
 and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to 
 the other half of the world of life, picture to yourselves 
 the great Finner whale, hugest of beasts that live, or 
 have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of bone, 
 muscle and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in 
 which the stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would 
 flounder hopelessly; and contrast him with the invisi- 
 ble animalcules mere gelatinous specks, multitudes 
 of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a 
 needle with the same ease as the angels of the School- 
 men could, in imagination. With these images before 
 your minds, you may well ask, what community of form, 
 or structure, is there between the animalcule and the 
 whale; or between the fungus and the fig-tree ? And, a 
 fortiori, between all four ? 
 
 Finally, if we regard substance, or material composi- 
 tion, what hidden bond can connect the flower which 
 a girl wears in her hair and the blood which courses 
 through her youthful veins ; or, what is there in com- 
 mon between the dense and resisting mass of the oak, 
 or the strong fabric of the tortoise, and those broad 
 disks of glassy jelly which may be seen pulsating 
 through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away 
 to mere films in the hand which raises them out of their 
 element ? 
 
 Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the 
 mind of every one who ponders, for the first time, upon 
 the conception of a single physical basis of life under-
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 97 
 
 lying all the diversities of vital existence ; but I propose 
 to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these ap- 
 parent difficulties, a threefold unity namely, a unitv 
 of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of 
 substantial composition does pervade the whole liv- 
 ing world. 
 
 No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the 
 first place to prove that the powers, or faculties, of all 
 kinds of living matter, diverse as they may be in degree, 
 are substantially similar in kind. 
 
 Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of man- 
 kind into the well-known epigram : 
 
 "Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit? Es will sich ernahren 
 Kinder zeugen, und die nahren so gut es vermag. 
 
 Weiter bringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie er auch will." 
 
 In physiological language this means, that all the 
 multifarious and complicated activities of man are 
 comprehensible under three categories. Either they are 
 immediately directed towards the maintenance and 
 development of the body, or they effect transitory 
 changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, 
 or they tend towards the continuance of the species. 
 Even those manifestations of intellect, of feeling, and 
 of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are 
 not excluded from this classification, inasmuch as to 
 every one but the subject of them, they are known only 
 as transitory changes in the relative positions of parts 
 of the body. Speech, gesture, and every other form of 
 human action are, in the long run, resolvable into mus- 
 cular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a 
 transitory change in the relative positions of the parts 
 of a muscle. But the scheme which is large enough to
 
 98 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 embrace the activities of the highest form of life, covers 
 all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or 
 animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In 
 addition, all animals manifest those transitory changes 
 of form which we class under irritability and contractil- 
 ity; and, it is more than probable, that when the vege- 
 table world is thoroughly explored, we shall find all 
 plants in possession of the same powers, at one time or 
 other of their existence. 
 
 I am not now alluding to such phsenomena, at once 
 rare and conspicuous, as those exhibited by the leaflets 
 of the sensitive plants, or the stamens of the barberry, 
 but to much more widely spread, and at the same time, 
 more subtle and hidden, manifestations of vegetable 
 contractility. You are doubtless aware that the com- 
 mon nettle owes its stinging property to the innumer- 
 able stiff and needle-like, though exquisitely delicate, 
 hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle 
 tapers from a broad base to a slender summit, which, 
 though rounded at the end, is of such microscopic fine- 
 ness that it readily penetrates, and breaks off in, the 
 skin. The whole hair consists of a very delicate outer 
 case of wood, closery applied to the inner surface of 
 which is a layer of semifluid matter, full of innumerable 
 granules of extreme minuteness. This semi-fluid lining 
 is protoplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of bag, 
 full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in 
 form with the interior of the hair which it fills. When 
 viewed with a sufficiently high magnifying power, the 
 protoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen to be in a 
 condition of unceasing activity. Local contractions of 
 the whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and 
 gradually from point to point, and give rise to the ap- 
 pearance of progressive waves, just as the bending of
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 99 
 
 successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces the ap- 
 parent billows of a cornfield. 
 
 But, in addition to these movements, and independ- 
 ently of them, the granules are driven, in relatively 
 rapid streams, through channels in the protoplasm 
 which seem to have a considerable amount of persist- 
 ence. Most commonly, the currents in adjacent parts 
 of the protoplasm take similar directions; and, thus, 
 there is a general stream up one side of the hair and 
 down the other. But this does not prevent the existence 
 of partial currents which take different routes; and 
 sometimes trains of granules may be seen coursing 
 swiftly in opposite directions within a twenty-thou- 
 sandth of an inch of one another; while, occasionally, 
 opposite streams come into direct collision, and, after 
 a longer or shorter struggle, one predominates. The 
 cause of these currents seems to lie in contractions of 
 the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which 
 they flow, but which are so minute that the best mi- 
 croscopes show only their effects, and not themselves. 
 
 The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies 
 prisoned within the compass of the microscopic hair of 
 a plant, which we commonly regard as a merely passive 
 organism, is not easily forgotten by one who has 
 watched its display, continued hour after hour, without 
 pause or sign of weakening. The possible complexity 
 of many other organic forms, seemingly as simple as the 
 protoplasm of the nettle, dawns upon one; and the 
 comparison of such a protoplasm to a body w T ith an in- 
 ternal circulation, which has been put forward by an 
 eminent physiologist, loses much of its startling charac- 
 ter. Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle 
 have been observed in a great multitude of very differ- 
 ent plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that
 
 100 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all 
 young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonder- 
 ful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all,, due 
 only to the dulness of our hearing; and could our ears 
 catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they 
 whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which 
 constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the 
 roar of a great city. 
 
 Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than 
 the exception, that contractility should be still more 
 openly manifested at some periods of their existence. 
 The protoplasm of Algcs and Fungi becomes, under 
 many circumstances, partially, or completely, freed 
 from its woody case, and exhibits movements of its 
 whole mass, or is propelled by the contractility of one, 
 or more, hair-like prolongations of its body, which are 
 called vibratile cilia. And, so far as the conditions o' 
 the manifestation of the phenomena of contractility 
 have yet been studied, they are the same for the plant as 
 for the animal. Heat and electric shocks influence both, 
 and in the same way, though it may be in different de- 
 grees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that 
 there is no difference in faculty between the lowest 
 plant and the highest, or between plants and animals. 
 But the difference between the powers of the lowest 
 plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of de- 
 gree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long 
 ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the 
 principle of the division of labour is carried out in the 
 living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are 
 competent to perform all functions, and one and the 
 same portion of protoplasm may successfully take on 
 the function of feeding, moving, or reproducing appara- 
 tus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number of
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 101 
 
 parts combine to perform each function, each part do- 
 ing its allotted share of the work with great accuracy 
 and efficiency, but being useless for any other purpose. 
 
 On the other hand, notwithstanding all the funda- 
 mental resemblances which exist between the powers 
 of the protoplasm in plants and in animals, they pre- 
 sent a striking difference (to which I shall advert more 
 at length presently), in the fact that plants can manu- 
 facture fresh protoplasm out of mineral compounds, 
 whereas animals are obliged to procure it ready made, 
 and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants. Upon 
 what condition this difference in the powers of the two 
 great divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is 
 at present known. 
 
 With such qualifications as arises out of the last- 
 mentioned fact, it may be truly said that the acts of all r 
 living things are fundamentally one.flsFany such unity 
 predicable of their forms ? Let us seek in easily veri- 
 fied facts for a reply to this question. If a drop of blood 
 be drawn by pricking one's finger, and viewed with 
 proper precautions, and under a sufficiently high mi- 
 croscopic power, there will be seen, among the innu- 
 merable multitude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, 
 or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, a 
 comparatively small number of colourless corpuscles, 
 of somewhat larger size and very irregular shape. If 
 the drop of blood be kept at the temperature of the 
 body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit 
 a marvellous activity, changing their forms with great 
 rapidity, drawing in and thrusting out prolongations 
 of their substance, and creeping about as if they were 
 independent organisms. 
 
 The substance which is thus active is a mass of pro- 
 toplasm, and its activity differs in detail, rather than in
 
 102 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 principle, from that of the protoplasm of the nettle. 
 Under sundry circumstances the corpuscle dies and 
 becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of 
 which is seen a smaller spherical body, which existed, 
 but was more or less hidden, in the living corpuscle, and 
 is called its nucleus. Corpuscles of essentially similar 
 structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining of the 
 mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of 
 the body. Nay, more; in the earliest condition of the 
 human organism, in that state in which it has but just 
 become distinguishable from the egg in which it arises, 
 it is nothing but an aggregation of such corpuscles, and 
 every organ of the body was, once, no more than such 
 an aggregation. 
 
 Thus a nucleated mass of protoplasm turns out to be 
 what may be termed the structural unit of the human 
 body. As a matter of fact, the body, in its earliest state, 
 is a mere multiple of such units ; and in its perfect con- 
 dition, it is a multiple of such units, variously modified. 
 
 But does the formula which expresses the essential 
 structural character of the highest animal cover all the 
 rest, as the statement of its powers and faculties covered 
 that of all others ? Very nearly. Beast and fowl, reptile 
 and fish, mollusk, worm, and polype, are all composed 
 of structural units of the same character, namely, 
 masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry 
 very low animals, each of which, structurally, is a mere 
 colourless blood - corpuscle, leading an independent 
 life. But, at the very bottom of the animal scale, even 
 this simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phse- 
 nomena of life are manifested by a particle of proto- 
 plasm without a nucleus. Nor are such organisms in- 
 significant by reason of their want of complexity. It is 
 a fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 103 
 
 forms of life, which people an immense extent of the 
 bottom of the sea, would not outweigh that of all the 
 higher living beings which inhabit the land put together. 
 And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, 
 such living beings as these have been the greatest of 
 rock builders. 
 
 What has been said of the animal world is no less 
 true of plants. Imbedded in the protoplasm at the 
 broad, or attached, end of the nettle hair, there lies 
 a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examination further 
 proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made 
 up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated proto- 
 plasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modi- 
 fied in form, sometimes into a woody fibre, sometimes 
 into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen 
 grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, 
 the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of 
 nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in 
 the lowest animals, a single mass of such protoplasm 
 may constitute the whole plant, or the protoplasm may 
 exist without a nucleus. 
 
 Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how 
 is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be dis- 
 tinguished from another? why call one "plant" and 
 the other "animal"? 
 
 The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, 
 plants and animals are not separable, and that, in 
 many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether 
 we call a given organism an animal or a plant. There 
 is a living body called jEthalium septicum, which ap- 
 pears upon decaying vegetable substances, and, in one 
 of its forms, is common upon the surfaces of tan-pits. 
 In this condition it is, to all intents and purposes, a 
 fungus, and formerly was always regarded as such ; but
 
 104 OX THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 the remarkable investigations of De Bary have shown 
 that, in another condition, the sEthalium is an actively 
 locomotive creature, and takes in solid matters, upon 
 which, apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the most 
 characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant ; or 
 is it an animal? Is it both; or is it neither? Some 
 decide in favour of the last supposition, and establish 
 an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological No Man's 
 Land for all these questionable forms. But, as it is ad- 
 mittedly impossible to draw any distinct boundary line 
 between this no man's land and the vegetable world on 
 the one hand, or the animal, on the other, it appears to 
 me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty 
 which, before, was single. 
 
 Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis 
 of all life. It is the clay of the potter : which, bake it and 
 paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, 
 and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun- 
 dried clod. 
 
 Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cog- 
 nate, and that all living forms are fundamentally of one 
 character. The researches of the chemist have revealed 
 a no less striking uniformity of material composition in 
 living matter. 
 
 In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investi- 
 gation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of the com- 
 position of living matter, inasmuch as such matter 
 must needs die in the act of analysis, and upon this 
 very obvious ground, objections, which I confess seem 
 to me to be somewhat frivolous, have been raised to the 
 drawing of any conclusions whatever respecting the 
 composition of actually living matter, from that of the 
 dead matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But 
 objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that it is
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 105 
 
 also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the 
 composition of any body whatever, as it is. The state- 
 ment that a crystal of calc-spar consists of carbonate of 
 lime, is quite true, if we only mean that, by appropriate 
 processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and 
 quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the 
 very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate 
 of lime again ; but it will not be calc-spar, nor anything 
 like it. Can it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis 
 teaches nothing about the chemical composition of 
 calc-spar ? Such a statement would be absurd ; but it is 
 hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears 
 about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical 
 analysis to the -living bodies which have yielded them. 
 
 One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refine- 
 ments, and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm 
 which have yet been examined contain the four ele- 
 ments, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very 
 complex union, and that they behave similarly towards 
 several reagents. To this complex combination, the 
 nature of which has never been determined with exact- 
 ness, the name of Protein has been applied. And if we 
 use this term with such caution as may properly arise 
 out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which 
 it stands, it may be truly said, that all protoplasm is 
 proteinaceous, or, as the white, or albumen, of an egg 
 is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure 
 proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is 
 more or less albuminoid. 
 
 Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms 
 of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of 
 electric shocks ; and yet the number of cases in which 
 the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be affected 
 by this agency increases every day.
 
 106 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS. OF LIFE 
 
 Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence, that 
 all forms of protoplasm are liable to undergo that pe- 
 culiar coagulation at a temperature of 40 50 centi- 
 grade, which has been called "heat-stiffening," though 
 Kiihne's beautiful researches have proved this occur- 
 rence to take place in so many and such diverse living 
 beings, that it is hardly rash to expect that the law 
 holds good for all. 
 
 Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the exist- 
 ence of a general uniformity in the character of the 
 protoplasm, or physical basis, of life, in whatever 
 group of living beings it may be studied. But it will be 
 understood that this general uniformity by no means 
 excludes any amount of special modifications of the 
 fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of 
 lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, 
 though no one doubts that, under all these Protean 
 changes, it is one and the same thing. 
 
 And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the 
 origin, of the matter of life ? 
 
 Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, dif- 
 fused throughout the universe in molecules, which are 
 indestructible and unchangeable in themselves ; but, in 
 endless transmigration, unite in innumerable permu- 
 tations, into the diversified forms of life we know ? Or, 
 is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differ- 
 ing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are 
 aggregated ? Is it built up of ordinary matter, and again 
 resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done ? 
 
 Modern science does not hesitate a moment between 
 these alternatives. Physiology writes over the portals 
 of life 
 
 " Debemur rnorti nos nostraque,"
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 107 
 
 with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet at- 
 tached to that melancholy line. Under whatever dis- 
 guise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or 
 man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and 
 is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but 
 is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, 
 could not live unless it died. 
 
 In the wonderful story of the Peau de Chagrin, 
 the hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass' skin, 
 which yields him the means of gratifying all his wishes. 
 But its surface represents the duration of the proprie- 
 tor's life ; and for every satisfied desire the skin shrinks 
 in proportion to the intensity of fruition, until at length 
 life and the last handbreadth of the peau de chagrin, 
 disappear with the gratification of a last wish. 
 
 Balzac's studies had led him over a wide range of 
 thought and speculation, and his shadowing forth of 
 physiological truth in this strange story may have been 
 intentional. At any rate, the matter of life is a veritable 
 peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat 
 the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of 
 life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of proto- 
 plasm. 
 
 Every word uttered by a speaker costs him some 
 physical loss ; and, in the strictest sense, he burns that 
 others may have light so much eloquence, so much 
 of his body resolved into carbonic acid, water, and urea. 
 It is clear that this process of expenditure cannot go on 
 for ever. But, happily, the protoplasmic peau de cha- 
 grin differs from Balzac's in its capacity of being re- 
 paired, and brought back to its full size, after every 
 exertion. 
 
 For example, this present lecture, whatever its intel- 
 lectual worth to you, has a certain physical value to me,
 
 108 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 which is, conceivably, expressible by the number of 
 grains of protoplasm and other bodily substance wasted 
 in maintaining my vital processes during its delivery. 
 My peau de chagrin will be distinctly smaller at the end 
 of the discourse than it was at the beginning. By and 
 by, I shall probably have recourse to the substance 
 commonly called mutton, for the purpose of stretching 
 it back to its original size. Now this mutton was once 
 the living protoplasm, more or less modified, of another 
 animal a sheep. As I shall eat it, it is the same mat- 
 ter altered, not only by death, but by exposure to sundry 
 artificial operations in the process of cooking. 
 
 But these changes, whatever be their extent, have not 
 rendered it incompetent to resume its old functions as 
 matter of life. A singular inward laboratory, which I 
 possess, will dissolve a certain portion of the modified 
 protoplasm; the solution so formed will pass into my 
 veins ; and the subtle influences to which it will then be 
 subjected will convert the dead protoplasm into living 
 protoplasm, and transubstantiate sheep into man. 
 
 Nor is this all. If digestion were a thing to be trifled 
 with, I might sup upon lobster, and the matter of life 
 of the crustacean would undergo the same wonderful 
 metamorphosis into humanity. And were I to return 
 to my own place by sea, and undergo shipwreck, the 
 crustacean might, and probably would, return the com- 
 pliment, and demonstrate our common nature by turn- 
 ing my protoplasm into living lobster. Or, if nothing 
 better were to be had, I might supply my wants with 
 mere bread, and I should find the protoplasm of the 
 wheat-plant to be convertible into man, with no more 
 trouble than that of the sheep, and with far less, I 
 fancy, than that of the lobster. 
 
 Hence it appears to be a matter of no great moment
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 109 
 
 what animal, or what plant, I lay under contribution 
 for protoplasm, and the fact speaks volumes for the 
 general identity of that substance in all living beings. 
 I share this catholicity of assimilation with other ani- 
 mals, all of which, so far as we know, could thrive 
 equally well on the protoplasm of any of their fellows, 
 or of any plant ; but here the assimilative powers of the 
 animal world cease. A solution of smelling-salts in 
 water, with an infinitesimal proportion of some other 
 saline matters, contains all the elementary bodies 
 which enter into the composition of protoplasm; but, 
 as I need hardly say, a hogshead of that fluid would not 
 keep a hungry man from starving, nor would it save 
 any animal whatever from a like fate. An animal can- 
 not make protoplasm, but must take it ready-made 
 from some other animal, or some plant the animal's 
 highest feat of constructive chemistry being to convert 
 dead protoplasm into that living matter of life which is 
 appropriate to itself. 
 
 Therefore, in seeking for the origin of protoplasm, 
 we must eventually turn to the vegetable world. A 
 fluid containing carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous 
 salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast to the animal, 
 is a table richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, 
 with a due supply of only such materials, many a plant 
 will not only maintain itself in vigour, but grow and 
 multiply until it has increased a million -fold, or a mil- 
 lion million-fold, the quantity of protoplasm which it 
 originally possessed ; in this way building up the matter 
 of life, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter 
 of the universe. 
 
 Thus, the animal can only raise the complex sub- 
 stance of dead protoplasm to the higher power, as 
 one may say, of living protoplasm ; while the plant can
 
 110 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 raise the less complex substances carbonic acid, 
 water, and nitrogenous salts to the same stage of 
 living protoplasm, if not to the same level. But the 
 plant also has its limitations. Some of the fungi, for 
 example, appear to need higher compounds to start 
 with; and no known plant can live upon the uncom- 
 pounded elements of protoplasm. A plant supplied 
 with pure carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, 
 phosphorus, sulphur, and the like, would as infallibly 
 die as the animal in his bath of smelling-salts, though 
 it would be surrounded by all the constituents of proto- 
 plasm. Nor, indeed, need the process of simplification 
 of vegetable food be carried so far as this, in order to 
 arrive at the limit of the plant's thaumaturgy. Let 
 water, carbonic acid, and all the other needful constit- 
 uents be supplied except nitrogenous salts, and an 
 ordinary plant will still be unable to manufacture pro- 
 toplasm. 
 
 Thus the matter of life, so far as we know it (and we 
 have no right to speculate on any other), breaks up, 
 in consequence of that continual death which is the con- 
 dition of its manifesting vitality, into carbonic acid, 
 water, and nitrogenous compounds, which certainly 
 possess no properties but those of ordinary matter. And 
 out of these same forms of ordinary matter, and from 
 none which are simpler, the vegetable world builds 
 up all the protoplasm which keeps the animal world 
 a-going. Plants are the accumulators of the power 
 which animals distribute and disperse. 
 - But it will be observed, that the existence of the mat- 
 ter of life depends on the pre-existence of certain com- 
 pounds; namely, carbonic acid, water, and certain 
 nitrogenous bodies. Withdraw any one of these three 
 from the world, and all vital phenomena come to an
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 111 
 
 end. They are as necessary to the protoplasm of the 
 plant, as the protoplasm of the plant is to that of the 
 animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are 
 all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite 
 in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to 
 give rise to carbonic acid; hydrogen and oxygen pro- 
 duce water; nitrogen and other elements give rise to 
 nitrogenous salts. These new compounds, like the 
 elementary bodies of which they are composed, are 
 lifeless. But when they are brought together, under 
 certain conditions, they give rise to the still more com- 
 plex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits 
 the phsenomena of life. 
 
 I see no break in this series of steps in molecular 
 complication, and I am unable to understand why the 
 language which is applicable to any one term of the 
 series may not be used to any of the others. We think 
 fit to call different kinds of matter carbon, oxygen, 
 hydrogen, and nitrogen, and to speak of the various 
 powers and activities of these substances as the proper- 
 ties of the matter of which they are composed. 
 
 When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in a certain 
 proportion, and an electric spark is passed through 
 them, they disappear, and a quantity of water, equal 
 in weight to the sum of their weights, appears in their 
 place. There is not the slightest parity between the 
 passive and active powers of the water and those of the 
 oxygen and hydrogen which have given rise to it. At 
 32 Fahrenheit, and far below that temperature, oxygen 
 and hydrogen are elastic gaseous bodies, whose particles 
 tend to rush away from one another with great force. 
 Water, at the same temperature, is a strong though 
 brittle solid whose particles tend to cohere into definite 
 geometrical shapes, and sometimes build up frosty imi-
 
 112 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 tations of the most complex forms of vegetable foli- 
 age. 
 
 Nevertheless we call these, and many other strange 
 phsenomena, the properties of the water, and we do not 
 hesitate to believe that, in some way or another, they 
 result from the properties of the component elements 
 of the water. We do not assume that a something called 
 "aquosity" entered into and took possession of the 
 oxidated hydrogen as soon as it was formed, and then 
 guided the aqueous particles to their places in the facets 
 of the crystal, or amongst the leaflets of the hoar-frost. 
 On the contrary, we live in the hope and in the faith 
 that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by 
 and by be able to see our way as clearly from the constit- 
 uents of water to the properties of water, as we are 
 now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the 
 form of its parts and the manner in which they are put 
 together. 
 
 Is the case in any way changed when carbonic acid, 
 water, and nitrogenous salts disappear, and in their 
 place, under the influence of pre-existing living proto- 
 plasm, an equivalent weight of the matter of life makes 
 its appearance? 
 
 It is true that there is no sort of parity between the 
 properties of the components and the properties of the 
 resultant, but neither was there in the case of the water. 
 It is also true that what I have spoken of as the influ- 
 ence of pre-existing living matter is something quite 
 unintelligible; but does anybody quite comprehend the 
 modus operandi of an electric spark, which traverses a 
 mixture of oxygen and hydrogen ? 
 
 What justification is there, then, for the assumption 
 of the existence in the living matter of a something 
 which has no representative, or correlative, in the not
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 113 
 
 living matter which gave rise to it ? What better philo- 
 sophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And 
 why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the 
 other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus 
 Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat- 
 jack by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and 
 scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the 
 turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by 
 the draught of the chimney. 
 
 If scientific language is to possess a definite and con- 
 stant signification whenever it is employed, it seems to 
 me that we are logically bound to apply to the proto- 
 plasm, or physical basis of life, the same conceptions as 
 those which are held to be legitimate elsewhere. If the 
 phsenomena exhibited by water are its properties, so 
 are those presented by protoplasm, living or dead, its 
 properties. 
 
 If the properties of water may be properly said to 
 result from the nature and disposition of its component 
 molecules, I can find no intelligible ground for refusing 
 to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the 
 nature and disposition of its molecules. 
 
 But I bid you beware that, in accepting these con- 
 clusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of a 
 ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse 
 of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven. It may 
 seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions of 
 a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties of their 
 protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of 
 the matter of which they are composed. But if, as I* 
 have endeavoured to prove to you, their protoplasm is 
 essentially identical with, and most readily converted 
 into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halt- 
 ing-place between the admission that such is the case,
 
 114 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 
 
 and the further concession that all vital action may, 
 with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the 
 molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. 
 And if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the 
 same extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giv- 
 ing utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are 
 the expression of molecular changes in that matter of 
 life which is the source of our other vital phsenomena.
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 THE marine productions which are commonly 
 known by the names of "Corals" and "Corallines," 
 were thought by the ancients to be sea-weeds, which 
 had the singular property of becoming hard and solid, 
 when they were fished up from their native depths and 
 came into 'contact with the air. 
 
 "Sic et curalium, quo primum contigit auras 
 Tempore durescit: mollis fuit herba sub undis," 
 
 says Ovid (Metam. xv) ; and it was not until the seven- 
 teenth century that Boccone was emboldened, by per- 
 sonal experience of the facts, to declare that the holders 
 of this belief were no better than "idiots," who had 
 been misled by the softness of the outer coat of the 
 living red coral to imagine that it was soft all through. 
 Messer Boccone 's strong epithet is probably unde- 
 served, as the notion he controverts, in all likelihood, 
 arose merely from the misinterpretation of the strictly 
 true statement which any coral fisherman would make 
 to a curious inquirer; namely, that the outside coat of 
 the red coral is quite soft when it is taken out of the sea. 
 At any rate, he did good service by eliminating this 
 much error from the current notions about coral. But 
 the belief that corals are plants remained, not only in 
 the popular, but in the scientific mind ; and it received 
 what appeared to be a striking confirmation from the 
 researches of Marsigli in 1706. For this naturalist, 
 having the opportunity of observing freshly-taken red 
 coral, saw that its branches were beset with what
 
 116 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 looked like delicate and beautiful flowers each having 
 eight petals. It was true that these "flowers" could 
 protrude and retract themselves, but their motions 
 were hardly more extensive, or more varied, than those 
 of the leaves of the sensitive plant; and therefore they 
 could not be held to militate against the conclusion so 
 strongly suggested by their form and their grouping 
 upon the branches of a tree-like structure. 
 
 Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young 
 Marseilles physician, Peyssonel, conceived the desire 
 to study these singular sea-plants, and was sent by the 
 French Government on a mission to the Mediterranean 
 for that purpose. The pupil undertook the investiga- 
 tion full of confidence in the ideas of his master, but 
 being able to see and think for himself, he soon dis- 
 covered that those ideas by no means altogether corre- 
 sponded with reality. In an essay entitled " Traite du 
 Corail," which was communicated to the French Acad- 
 emy of Science, but which has never been published, 
 Peyssonel writes : 
 
 " Je fis fleurir le corail dans des vases pleins d'eau de 
 mer, et j'observai que ce que nous croyons etre la fleur 
 de cette pretendue plante n'etait au vrai, qu'un insecte 
 semblable a une petite Ortie ou Poulpe. J'avais le 
 plaisir de voir remuer les pattes, ou pieds, de cette 
 Ortie, et ayant mis le vase plein d'eau ou le corail etait 
 a une douce chaleur aupres du feu, tous les petits in- 
 sectes s'epanouirent. L'Ortie sortie etend les pieds, 
 et forme ce que M. de Marsigli et moi avions pris pour 
 les petales de la fleur. Le calice de cette pretendue fleur 
 est le corps meme de 1'animal avance et sorti hors de la 
 cellule." 
 
 1 This extract from Peyssonel's manuscript is given by M. Lacaze 
 Duthiers in his valuable Hiatoire Naturelle du Corail (1866).
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 117 
 
 The comparison of the flowers of the coral to a 
 "petite ortie," or "little nettle," is perfectly just, but 
 needs explanation. "Ortie de mer," or "sea-nettle," 
 is, in fact, the French appellation for our "sea-anem- 
 one," a creature with which everybody, since the great 
 aquarium mania, must have become familiar, even to 
 the limits of boredom. In 1710, the great naturalist, 
 Reaumur, had written a memoir for the express pur- 
 pose of demonstrating that these "orties" are animals; 
 and with this important paper Peyssonel must neces- 
 sarily have been familiar. Therefore, when he declared 
 the "flowers" of the red coral to be little "orties," it 
 was the same thing as saying that they were animals 
 of the same general nature as sea-anemones. But to 
 Peyssonel's contemporaries this was an extremely 
 startling announcement. It was hard to imagine the 
 existence of such a thing as an association of animals 
 into a structure with stem and branches altogether like 
 a plant, and fixed to the soil as a plant is fixed ; and the 
 naturalists of that day preferred not to imagine it. Even 
 Reaumur could not bring himself to accept the notion, 
 and France being blessed with Academicians, whose 
 great function (as the late Bishop Wilson and an emi- 
 nent modern writer have so well shown) is to cause 
 sweetness and light to prevail, and to prevent such 
 unmannerly fellows as Peyssonel from blurting out 
 unedifying truths, they suppressed him; and, as afore- 
 said, his great work remained in manuscript, and may 
 at this day be consulted by the curious in that state, in 
 the Bibliotheque du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. 
 Peyssonel, who evidently was a person of savage and 
 untameable disposition, so far from appreciating the 
 kindness of the Academicians in giving him time to 
 reflect upon the unreasonableness, not to say rudeness,
 
 118 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 of making public statements in opposition to the views 
 of some of the most distinguished of their body, seems 
 bitterly to have resented the treatment he met with. 
 For he sent all further communications to the Royal 
 Society of London, which never had, and it is to be 
 hoped never will have, anything of an academic con- 
 stitution ; and finally he took himself off to Guadaloupe, 
 and became lost to science altogether. 
 
 Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's 
 suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley published his 
 wonderful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra, 
 Bernard de Jussieu and Guettard followed them up by 
 like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and coral- 
 lines ; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire 
 justice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made 
 him a half-and-half apology in the preface to the next 
 published volume of the " Memoires pour servir a 1'His- 
 toire des Insectes;" and, from this time forth, Peys- 
 sonel's doctrine that corals are the work of animal 
 organisms has been part of the body of established 
 scientific truth. 
 
 Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already 
 cited, compares the flower-like animal of the coral to a 
 " poulpe," which is the French form of the name " poly- 
 pus," "the many -footed," which the ancient 
 naturalists gave to the soft-bodied cuttlefishes, which, 
 like the coral animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, 
 disposed around a central mouth. Reaumur, admitting 
 the analogy indicated by Peyssonel, gave the name of 
 polypes, not only to the sea-anemone, the coral animal, 
 and the fresh-water Hydra, but to what are now known 
 as the Polyzoa, and he termed the skeleton which they 
 fabricate a " poly pier " or "polypidom." 
 
 The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time,
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 119 
 
 has made us very completely acquainted with the struc- 
 ture and habits of all these polypes. We know that, 
 among the sea-anemones and coral-forming animals, 
 each poylpe has a mouth leading to a stomach, which 
 is open at its inner end, and thus communicates freely 
 with the general cavity of the body; that the tentacles 
 placed round the mouth are hollow, and that they per- 
 form the part of arms in seizing and capturing prey. 
 It is known that many of these creatures are capable 
 of being multiplied by artificial division, the divided 
 halves growing, after a time, into complete and separate 
 animals; and that many are able to perform a very 
 similar process naturally, in such a manner that one 
 polype may, by repeated incomplete divisions, give rise 
 to a sort of sheet, or turf, formed by innumerable con- 
 nected, and yet independent, descendants. Or, what 
 is still more common, a polype may throw out buds, 
 which are converted into polypes, or branches bearing 
 polypes, until a tree-like mass, sometimes of very con- 
 siderable size, is formed. 
 
 This is what happens in the case of the red coral of 
 commerce. A minute polype, fixed to the rocky bottom 
 of the deep sea, grows up into a branched trunk. The 
 end of every branch and twig is terminated by a polype ; 
 and all the polypes are connected together by a fleshy 
 substance, traversed by innumerable canals which 
 place each polype in communication with every other, 
 and carry nourishment to the substance of the support- 
 ing stem. It is a sort of natural cooperative store, 
 every polype helping the whole, at the same time as it 
 helps itself. The interior of the stem, like that of the 
 branches, is solidified by the deposition of carbonate 
 of lime in its tissue, somewhat in the same fashion as 
 our own bones are formed of animal matter impreg-
 
 120 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 nated with lime salts; and it is this dense skeleton 
 (usually turned red by a peculiar colouring matter) 
 cleared of the soft animal investment, as the hard wood 
 of a tree might be stripped of its bark, which is the red 
 coral. 
 
 In the case of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs 
 to the interior of the stem and branches only; but in 
 the commoner white corals, each polype has a complete 
 skeleton of its own. These polypes are sometimes soli- 
 tary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by 
 a single cup, with partitions radiating from its centre 
 to its circumference. When the polypes formed by 
 budding or division remain associated, the polypidom 
 is sometimes made up of nothing but an aggregation of 
 these cups, while at other times the cups are at once 
 separated and held together, by an intermediate sub- 
 stance, which represents the branches of the red coral. 
 The red coral polype again is a comparatively rare 
 animal, inhabiting a limited area, the skeleton of which 
 has but a very insignificant mass ; while the white corals 
 are very common, occur in almost all seas, and form 
 skeletons which are sometimes extremely massive. 
 
 With a very few exceptions, both the red and the 
 white coral polypes are, in their adult state, firmly ad- 
 herent to the sea-bottom; nor do their buds naturally 
 become detached and locomotive. But, in addition to 
 budding and division, these creatures possess the more 
 ordinary methods of multiplication ; and, at particular 
 seasons, they give rise to numerous eggs of minute size. 
 Within these eggs the young are formed, and they leave 
 the egg in a condition which has no sort of resemblance 
 to the perfect animal. It is, in fact, a minute oval body, 
 many hundred times smaller than the full grown crea- 
 ture, and it swims about with great activity by the help
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 121 
 
 of multitudes of little hair-like filaments, called cilia, 
 with which its body is covered. These cilia all lash the 
 water in one direction, and so drive the little body along 
 as if it were propelled by thousands of extremely minute 
 paddles. After enjoying its freedom for a longer or 
 shorter time, and being carried either by the force of 
 its own cilia, or by currents which bear it along, the 
 embryo coral settles down to the bottom, loses its cilia, 
 and becomes fixed to the rock, gradually assuming the 
 polype form and growing up to the size of its parent. 
 As the infant polypes of the coral may retain this free 
 and active condition for many hours, or even days, and 
 as a tidal or other current in the sea may easily flow at 
 the speed of two or even more miles in an hour, it is 
 clear that the embryo must often be transported to very 
 considerable distances from the parent. And it is 
 easily understood how a single polype, which may give 
 rise to hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of embryos, 
 may, by this process of partly active and partly passive 
 migration, cover an immense surface with its offspring. 
 The masses of coral which may be formed by the as- 
 semblages of polypes which spring by budding, or by 
 dividing, from a single polype, occasionally attain very 
 considerable dimensions. Such skeletons are some- 
 times great plates, many feet long and several feet in 
 thickness ; or they may form huge half globes, like the 
 brainstone corals, or may reach the magnitude of stout 
 shrubs or even small trees. There is reason to believe 
 that such masses as these take a long time to form, and 
 hence that the age a polype tree, or polype turf, may 
 attain, may be considerable. But, sooner or later, the 
 coral polypes, like all other things, die; the soft flesh 
 decays, while the skeleton is left as a stony mass at the 
 bottom of the sea, where it retains its integrity for a
 
 122 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 longer or a shorter time, according as its position affords 
 more or less protection from the wear and tear of the 
 waves. 
 
 The polypes which give rise to the white coral are 
 found, as has been said, in the seas of all parts of the 
 world ; but in the temperate and cold oceans they are 
 scattered and comparatively small in size, so that the 
 skeletons of those which die do not accumulate in any 
 considerable quantity. But it is otherwise in the greater 
 part of the ocean which lies in the warmer parts of the 
 world, comprised within a distance of about eighteen 
 hundred miles on each side of the equator. Within the 
 zone thus bounded, by far the greater part of the ocean 
 is inhabited by coral polypes, which not only form very 
 strong and large skeletons, but associate together into 
 great masses, like the thickets and the meadow turf, 
 or, better still, the accumulations of peat, to which 
 plants give rise on dry land. These masses of stony 
 matter, heaped up beneath the waters of the ocean, 
 become as dangerous to mariners as so much ordinary 
 rock, and to these, as to the common rock ridges, the 
 seaman gives the name of " reefs." 
 
 Such coral reefs cover many thousand square miles in 
 the Pacific and in the Indian Oceans. There is one reef, 
 or rather great series of reefs, called the Barrier Reef, 
 which stretches, almost continuously, for more than 
 eleven hundred miles off the east coast of Australia. 
 Multitudes of the islands in the Pacific are either reefs 
 themselves, or are surrounded by reefs. The Red Sea 
 is in many parts almost a maze of such reefs, and they 
 abound no less in the West Indies, along the coast of 
 Florida, and even as far north as the Bahama Islands. 
 But it is a very remarkable circumstance that, within 
 the area of what we may call the "coral zone," there
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 123 
 
 are no coral reefs upon the west coast of America, nor 
 upon the west coast of Africa ; and it is a general fact 
 that the reefs are interrupted, or absent, opposite the 
 mouths of great rivers. The causes of this apparent 
 caprice in the distribution of coral reefs are not far to 
 seek. The polypes which fabricate them require for 
 their vigorous growth a temperature which must not 
 fall below 68 Fahrenheit all the year round, and this 
 temperature is only to be found within the distance on 
 each side of the equator which has been mentioned, or 
 thereabouts. But even within the coral zone this degree 
 of warmth is not everywhere to be had. On the west 
 coast of America, and on the corresponding coast of 
 Africa, the currents of cold water from the icy regions 
 which surround the South Pole set northward, and it 
 appears to be due to their cooling influence that the sea 
 in these regions is free from the reef builders. Again, 
 the coral polypes cannot live in water which is rendered 
 brackish by floods from the land, or which is perturbed 
 by mud from the same source, and hence it is that they 
 cease to exist opposite the mouths of rivers, which 
 damage them in both these ways. 
 
 Such is the general distribution of the reef-building 
 corals, but there are some very interesting and singular 
 circumstances to be observed in the conformation of 
 the reefs, when we consider them individually. The 
 reefs, in fact, are of three different kinds ; some of them 
 stretch out from the shore, almost like a prolongation 
 of the beach, covered only by shallow water, and in the 
 case of an island, surrounding it like a fringe of no con- 
 siderable breadth. These are termed "fringing reefs." 
 Others are separated by a channel which may attain a 
 width of many miles, and a depth of twenty or thirty 
 fathoms or more, from the nearest land ; and when this
 
 124 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 land is an island, the reef surrounds it like a low wall, 
 and the sea between the reef and the land is, as it were, 
 a moat inside this wall. Such reefs as these are called 
 "encircling" when they surround an island; and "bar- 
 jier" reefs, when they stretch parallel with the coast 
 of a continent. In both these cases there is ordinary 
 dry land inside the reef, and separated from it only by 
 a narrower or a wider, a shallower or a deeper, space of 
 sea, which is called a "lagoon," or "inner passage." 
 But there is a third kind of reef, of very common occur- 
 rence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which goes by 
 the name of " atoll." This is, to all intents and purposes, 
 an encircling reef, without anything to encircle; or, in 
 other words, without an island in the middle of its 
 lagoon. The atoll has exactly the appearance of a 
 vast, irregularly oval, or circular, breakwater, enclosing 
 smooth water in its midst. The depth of the water in 
 the lagoon rarely exceeds twenty or thirty fathoms, but, 
 outside the reef, it deepens with great rapidity to two 
 hundred or three hundred fathoms. The depth imme- 
 diately outside the barrier, or encircling, reefs, may also 
 be very considerable ; but, at the outer edge of a fringing 
 reef, it does not amount usually to more than twenty or 
 twenty-five fathoms ; in other words, from one hundred 
 and twenty to one hundred and fifty feet. 
 
 Thus, if the water of the ocean should be suddenly 
 drained away, we should see the atolls rising from the 
 sea-bed like vast truncated cones, and resembling so 
 many volcanic craters, except that their sides would be 
 steeper than those of an ordinary volcano. In the case 
 of the encircling reefs, the cone, with the enclosed island, 
 would look like Vesuvius with Monte Xuovo within 
 the old crater of Somma ; while, finally, the island with 
 a fringing reef would have the appearance of an ordi-
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 125 
 
 nary hill, or mountain, girded by a vast parapet, within 
 which would lie a shallow moat. And the dry bed of 
 the Pacific might afford grounds for an inhabitant of 
 the moon to speculate upon the extraordinary sub- 
 terranean activity to which these vast and numerous 
 "craters" bore witness! 
 
 When the structure of a fringing reef is investigated, 
 the bottom of the lagoon is found to be covered with 
 fine whitish mud, which results from the breaking up 
 of the dead corals. Upon this muddy floor there lie, 
 here and there, growing corals, or occasionally great 
 blocks of dead coral, which have been torn by storms 
 from the outer edge of the reef, and washed into the 
 lagoon. Shellfish and worms of various kinds abound ; 
 and fish, some of which prey upon the coral, sport in 
 the deeper pools. But the corals which are to be seen 
 growing in the shallow waters of the lagoon are of a 
 different kind from those which abound on the outer 
 edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close 
 to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in 
 calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral 
 rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vege- 
 table organism, which contains a great deal of lime 
 the so-called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the 
 edge of the reef which is always covered by the breaking 
 waves, the living, true, reef-polypes make their appear- 
 ance; and, in different forms, coat the steep seaward 
 face of the reef to a depth of one hundred or even one 
 hundred and fifty feet. Beyond this depth the sounding- 
 lead rests, not upon the wall-like face of the reef, but 
 on the ordinary shelving sea-bottom. And the distance 
 to which a fringing reef extends from the land corre- 
 sponds with that at which the sea has a depth of twenty 
 or five-and-twenty fathoms.
 
 126 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 If, as we have supposed, the sea could be suddenly 
 withdrawn from around an island provided with a 
 fringing reef, such as the Mauritius, the reef would 
 present the aspect of a terrace, its seaward face, one 
 hundred feet or more high, blooming with the animal 
 flowers of the coral, while its surface would be hol- 
 lowed out into a shallow and irregular moat-like exca- 
 vation. 
 
 The coral mud, which occupies the bottom of the 
 lagoon, and with which all the interstices of the coral 
 skeletons which accumulate to form the reef are filled 
 up, does not proceed from the washing action of the 
 waves alone; innumerable fishes, and other creatures 
 which prey upon the coral, add a very important con- 
 tribution of finely-triturated calcareous matter ; and the 
 corals and mud becoming incorporated together, 
 gradually harden and give rise to a sort of limestone 
 rock, which may vary a good deal in texture. Some- 
 times it remains friable and chalky, but, more often, 
 the infiltration of water, charged with carbonic acid, 
 dissolves some of the calcareous matter, and deposits 
 it elsewhere in the interstices of the nascent rock, thus 
 glueing and cementing the particles together into a 
 hard mass ; or it may even dissolve the carbonate of lime 
 more extensively, and re-deposit it in a crystalline 
 form. On the beach of the lagoon, where the coral 
 sand is washed into layers by the action of the waves, 
 its grains become thus fused together into strata of a 
 limestone, so hard that they ring when struck with a 
 hammer, and inclined at a gentle angle, corresponding 
 with that of the surface of the beach. The hard parts 
 of the many animals which live upon the reef become 
 imbedded in this coral limestone, so that a block may 
 be full of shells of bivalves and univalves, or of sea-
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 1(27 
 
 urchins ; and even sometimes encloses the eggs of tur- 
 tles in a state of petrification. The active and vigorous 
 growth of the reef goes on only at the seaward margins, 
 where the polypes are exposed to tlie wash of the surf, 
 and are thereby provided with an abundant supply of 
 air and of food. The interior portion of the reef may 
 be regarded as almost wholly an accumulation of dead 
 skeletons. Where a river comes down from the land 
 there is a break in the reef, for the reasons which have 
 been already mentioned. 
 
 The origin and mode of formation of a fringing reef, 
 such as that just described, are plain enough. The 
 embryos of the coral polypes have fixed themselves 
 upon the submerged shore of the island, as far out as 
 they could live, namely, to a depth of twenty or twenty- 
 five fathoms. One generation has succeeded another, 
 building itself up upon the dead skeletons of its prede- 
 cessor. The mass has been consolidated by the in- 
 filtration of coral mud, and hardened by partial solu- 
 tion and redeposition, until a great rampart of coral 
 rock one hundred or one hundred and fifty feet high 
 on its seaward face has been formed all round the is- 
 land, with only such gaps as result from the outflow of 
 rivers, in the place of sally-ports. 
 
 The structure of the rocky accumulation in the en- 
 circling reefs and in the atolls is essentially the same 
 as in the fringing reef. But, in addition to the differ- 
 ences of depth inside and out, they present some other 
 peculiarities. These reefs, and especially the atolls, 
 are usually interrupted at one part of their circumfer- 
 ence, and this part is always situated on the leeward 
 side of the reef, or that which is the more sheltered side. 
 Now, as all these reefs are situated within the region 
 in which the tradewinds prevail, it follows that, on the
 
 128 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 north side of the equator, where the trade-wind is a 
 northeasterly wind, the opening of the reef is on the 
 southwest side: while in the southern hemisphere, 
 where the trade-winds blow from the southeast, the 
 opening lies to the northwest. The curious practical 
 result follows from this structure, that the lagoons to 
 these reefs really form admirable harbours, if a ship 
 can only get inside them. But the main difference 
 between the encircling reefs and the atolls, on the one 
 hand, and the fringing reefs on the other, lies in the 
 fact of the much greater depth of water on the seaward 
 faces of the former. As a consequence of this fact, the 
 whole of this face is not, as it is in the case of the 
 fringing reef, covered with living coral polypes. For, 
 as we have seen, these polypes cannot live at a greater 
 depth than about twenty-five fathoms; and actual 
 observation has shown that while, down to this depth, 
 the sounding-lead will bring up branches of live coral 
 from the outer wall of such a reef, at a greater depth it 
 fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and coral 
 sand. We must, therefore, picture to ourselves an 
 atoll, or an encircling reef, as fringed for one hundred 
 feet, or more, from its summit, with coral polypes 
 busily engaged in fabricating coral; while, below this 
 comparatively narrow belt, its surface is a bare and 
 smooth expanse of coral sand, supported upon and 
 within a core of coral limestone. Thus, if the bed of the 
 Pacific were suddenly laid bare, as was just now sup- 
 posed, the appearance of the reef-mountains would be 
 exactly the reverse of that presented by many high 
 mountains on land. For these are white with snow at 
 the top, while their bases are clothed with an abundant 
 and gaudily-coloured vegetation. But the coral cones 
 would look grey and barren below, while their summits
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 129 
 
 would be gay with a richly-coloured parterre of flower- 
 like coral polypes. 
 
 The practical difficulties of sounding upon, and of 
 bringing up portions of, the seaward face of an atoll or 
 of an encircling reef, are so great, in consequence of the 
 constant and dangerous swell which sets towards it, 
 that no exact information concerning the depth to 
 which the reefs are composed of coral has yet been 
 obtained. There is no reason to doubt, however, that 
 the reef-cone has the same structure from its summit 
 to its base, and that its sea-wall is throughout mainly 
 composed of dead coral. 
 
 And now arises a serious difficulty. If the coral pol- 
 ypes cannot live at a greater depth than one hundred or 
 one hundred and fifty feet, how can they have built up 
 the base of the reef- cone, which may be two thousand 
 feet, or more, below the surface of the sea ? 
 
 In order to get over this objection, it was at one time 
 supposed that the reef-building polypes had settled 
 upon the summits of a chain of submarine mountains. 
 But what is there in physical geography to justify the 
 assumption of the existence of a chain of mountains 
 stretching for one thousand miles or more, and so 
 nearly of the same height, that none should rise above 
 the level of the sea, nor fall one hundred and fifty feet 
 below that level ? 
 
 How, again, on this hypothesis, are atolls to be ac- 
 counted for, unless, as some have done, we take refuge 
 in the wild supposition that every atoll corresponds 
 with the crater of a submarine volcano ? And what ex- 
 planation does it afford of the fact that, in some parts 
 of the ocean, only atolls and encircling reefs occur, 
 while others present none but fringing reefs ? 
 
 These and other puzzling facts remained insoluble
 
 130 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 until the publication, in the year 1840, of Mr. Darwin's 
 famous work on coral reefs ; in which a key was given 
 to all the difficult problems connected with the subject, 
 and every difficulty was shown to be capable of solution 
 by deductive reasoning from a happy combination 
 of certain well-established geological and biological 
 truths. Mr. Darwin, in fact, showed that, so long as 
 the level of the sea remains unaltered in any area in 
 which coral reefs are being formed, or if the level of the 
 sea relatively to that of the land is falling, the only 
 reefs which can be formed are fringing reefs. While 
 if, on the contrary, the level of the sea is rising rela- 
 tively to that of the land, at a rate not faster than that 
 at which the upward growth of the coral can keep pace 
 with it, the reef will gradually pass from the condition 
 of a fringing, into that of an encircling or barrier reef. 
 And, finally, that if the relative level of the sea rise so 
 much that the encircled land is completely submerged, 
 the reef must necessarily pass into the condition of an 
 atoll. 
 
 For, suppose the relative level of the sea to remain 
 stationary, after a fringing reef has reached that dis- 
 tance from the land at which the depth of water 
 amounts to one hundred and fifty feet. Then the reef 
 cannot extend seaward by the migration of coral germs, 
 because these coral germs would find the bottom of the 
 sea to be too deep for them to live in. And the only 
 manner in which the reef could extend outwards, 
 would be by the gradual accumulation, at the foot of 
 its seaward face, of a talus of coral fragments torn off 
 by the violence of the waves, which talus might, in 
 course of time, become high enough to bring its upper 
 surface within the limits of coral growth, and in that 
 manner provide a sort of factitious sea-bottom upon
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 131 
 
 which the coral embryos might perch. If, on the other 
 hand, the level of the sea were slowly and gradually 
 lowered, it is clear that the parts of its bottom origi- 
 nally beyond the limit of coral growth would gradually 
 be brought within the required distance of the surface, 
 and thus the reef might be indefinitely extended. But 
 this process would give rise neither to an encircling reef 
 nor to an atoll, but to a broad belt of upheaved coral 
 rock, increasing the dimensions of the dry land, and 
 continuous seawards with the fresh fringing reef. 
 
 Suppose, however, that the sea-level rose instead of 
 falling, at the same slow and gradual rate at which we 
 know it to* be rising in some parts of the world, not 
 more, in fact, than a few inches, or, at most, a foot or 
 two, in a hundred years. Then, while the reef would 
 be unable to extend itself seaward, the sea-bottom out- 
 side it being gradually more and more removed from 
 the depth at which the life of the coral polypes is pos- 
 sible, it would be able to grow upwards as fast as the 
 sea rose. But the growth would take place almost ex- 
 clusively around the circumference of the reef, this 
 being the only region in which the coral polypes would 
 find the conditions favourable for their existence. The 
 bottom of the lagoon would be raised, in the main, only 
 by the coral debris and coral mud, formed in the manner 
 already described; consequently, the margins of the 
 reef would rise faster than the bottom, or, in other 
 words, the lagoon would constantly become deeper. 
 And, at the same time, it would gradually increase in 
 breadth; as the rising sea, covering more of the land, 
 would occupy a wider space between the edge of the 
 reef and what remained of the land. Thus the rising 
 sea would eventually convert a large island with a 
 fringing reef into a small island surrounded by an
 
 132 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 encircling reef. And it will be obvious that when the 
 rising of the sea has gone so far as completely to cover 
 the highest points of the island, the reef will have 
 passed into the condition of an atoll. 
 
 But how is it possible that the relative level of the 
 land and sea should be altered to this extent ? Clearly, 
 only in one of two ways : either the sea must have risen 
 over those areas which are now covered by atolls and 
 encircling reefs ; or, the land upon which the sea rests 
 must have been depressed to a corresponding extent. 
 
 If the sea has risen, its rise must have taken place 
 over the whole world simultaneously, and it must have 
 risen to the same height over all parts of the coral zone. 
 Grounds have been shown for the belief that the general 
 level of the sea may have been different at different 
 times ; it has been suggested, for example, that the ac- 
 cumulation of ice about the poles during one of the 
 cold periods of the earth's history necessarily implies 
 a diminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to 
 the amount of its water thus permanently locked up in 
 the Arctic and Antarctic ice-cellars ; while, in the warm 
 periods, the greater or less disappearance of the polar 
 ice-cap implies a corresponding addition of water to 
 the ocean. And no doubt this reasoning must be ad- 
 mitted to be sound in principle ; though it is very hard 
 to say what practical effect the additions and subtrac- 
 tions thus made have had on the level of the ocean; 
 inasmuch as such additions and subtractions might be 
 either intensified or nullified, by contemporaneous 
 changes in the level of the land. And no one has yet 
 shown that any such great melting of polar ice, and 
 consequent raising of the level of the water of the ocean, 
 has taken place since the existing atolls began to be 
 formed.
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 133 
 
 In the absence of any evidence that the sea has ever 
 risen to the extent required to give rise to the encircling 
 reefs and the atolls, Mr. Darwin adopted the opposite 
 hypothesis, viz., that the land has undergone extensive 
 and slow depression in those localities in which these 
 structures exist. 
 
 It seems, at first, a startling paradox, to suppose that 
 the land is less fixed than the sea ; but that such is the 
 case is the uniform testimony of geology. Beds of sand- 
 stone or limestone, thousands of feet thick, and all full 
 of marine remains, occur in various parts of the earth's 
 surface, and prove, beyond a doubt, that when these 
 beds were formed, that portion of the sea-bottom which 
 they then occupied underwent a slow and gradual 
 depression to a distance which cannot have been less 
 than the thickness of those beds, and may have been 
 very much greater. In supposing, therefore, that the 
 great areas of the Pacific and of the Indian Ocean, over 
 which atolls and encircling reefs are found scattered, 
 have undergone a depression of some hundreds, or, it 
 may be, thousands of feet, Mr. Darwin made a suppo- 
 sition which had nothing forced or improbable, but 
 was entirely in accordance with what we know to have 
 taken place over similarly extensive areas, in other 
 periods of the world's history. But Mr. Darwin sub- 
 jected his hypothesis to an ingenious indirect test. If 
 his view be correct, it is clear that neither atolls, nor 
 encircling reefs, should be found in those portions of 
 the ocean in which we have reason to believe, on inde- 
 pendent grounds, that the sea-bottom has long been 
 either stationary, or slowly rising. Now it is known 
 that, as a general rule, the level of the land is either 
 stationary, or is undergoing a slow upheaval, in the 
 neighborhood of active volcanoes; and, therefore,
 
 134 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 neither atolls nor encircling reefs ought to be found in 
 regions in which volcanoes are numerous and active. 
 And this turns out to be the case. Appended to Mr. 
 Darwin's great work on coral reefs, there is a map on 
 which atolls and encircling reefs are indicated by one 
 colour, fringing reefs by another, and active volcanoes 
 by a third. And it is at once obvious that the lines of 
 active volcanoes lie around the margins of the areas 
 occupied by the atolls and the encircling reefs. It is 
 exactly as if the upheaving volcanic agencies had lifted 
 up the edges of these great areas, while their centres had 
 undergone a corresponding depression. An atoll area 
 may, in short, be pictured as a kind of basin, the mar- 
 gins of which have been pushed up by the subterranean 
 forces, to which the craters of the volcanoes have, at 
 intervals, given vent. 
 
 Thus we must imagine the area of the Pacific now 
 covered by the Polynesian Archipelago, as having 
 been, at some former time, occupied by large islands, 
 or, may be, by a great continent, with the ordinarily 
 diversified surface of plain, and hill, and mountain 
 chain. The shores of this great land were doubtless 
 fringed by coral reefs; and, as it slowly underwent 
 depression, the hilly regions, converted into islands, 
 became, at first, surrounded by fringing reefs, and then, 
 as depression went on, these became converted into 
 encircling reefs, and these, finally, into atolls, until a 
 maze of reefs and coral-girdled islets took the place 
 of the original land masses. 
 
 Thus the atolls and the encircling reefs furnish us 
 with clear, though indirect, evidence of changes in the 
 physical geography of large parts of the earth's surface ; 
 and even, as my lamented friend, the late Professor 
 Jukes, has suggested, give us indications of the manner
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 135 
 
 in which some of the most puzzling facts connected 
 with the distribution of animals have been brought 
 about. For example, Australia and New Guinea are 
 separated by Torres Straits, a broad belt of sea one 
 hundred or one hundred and twenty miles wide. Nev- 
 ertheless, there is in many respects -a curious resem- 
 blance between the land animals which inhabit New 
 Guinea and the land animals which inhabit Australia. 
 But, at the same time, the marine shellfish which are 
 found in the shallow waters of the shores of New 
 Guinea are quite different from those which are met 
 with upon the coasts of Australia. Now, the eastern 
 end of Torres Straits is full of atolls, which, in fact, 
 form the northern termination of the Great Barrier 
 Reef which skirts the eastern coast of Australia. It 
 follows, therefore, that the eastern end of Torres 
 Straits is an area of depression, and it is very possible, 
 and on many grounds highly probable, that, in former 
 times, Australia and New Guinea were directly con- 
 nected together, and that Torres Straits did not exist. 
 If this were the case, the existence of cassowaries and of 
 marsupial quadrupeds, both in New Guinea and in 
 Australia, becomes intelligible; while the difference 
 between the littoral molluscs of the north and the 
 south shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by 
 the great probability that, when the depression in 
 question took place, and what was, at first, an arm of 
 the sea became converted into a strait separating Aus- 
 tralia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this 
 new sea became tenanted with marine animals from 
 the north, while the southern shore was peopled by 
 immigrants from the already existing marine Australian 
 fauna. 
 
 Inasmuch as the growth of the reef depends upon
 
 136 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 that of successive generations of coral polypes, and as 
 each generation takes a certain time to grow to its full 
 size, and can only separate its calcareous skeleton from 
 the water in which it lives at a certain rate, it is clear 
 that the reefs are records not only of changes in physical 
 geography, but of the lapse of time. It is by no means 
 easy, however, to estimate the exact value of reef- 
 chronology, and the attempts which have been made to 
 determine the rate at which a reef grows vertically 
 have yielded anything but precise results. A cautious 
 writer, Mr. Dana, whose extensive study of corals and 
 coral reefs makes him an eminently competent judge, 
 states his conclusion in the following terms : 
 
 " The rate of growth of the common branching mad- 
 repore is not over one and a half inches a year. As the 
 branches are open, this would not be equivalent to 
 more than half an inch in height of solid coral for the 
 whole surface covered by the madrepore; and, as they 
 are also porous, to not over three-eighths of an inch of 
 solid limestone. But a coral plantation has large bare 
 patches without corals, and the coral sands are widely 
 distributed by currents, part of them to depths over one 
 hundred feet where there are no living corals ; not more 
 than one-sixth of the surface of a reef region is, in fact, 
 covered with growing species. This reduces the three- 
 eighths to one-sixteenth. Shells and other organic relics 
 may contribute one-fourth as much as corals. At the 
 outside, the average upward increase of the whole reef- 
 ground per year would not exceed one-eighth of an 
 inch. 
 
 " Now some reefs are at least two thousand feet thick, 
 which at one-eighth of an inch a year, corresponds 
 to one hundred and ninety-two thousand years." l 
 1 Dana, Manual of Geology, P- 591.
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 137 
 
 Halve, or quarter, this estimate if you will, in order 
 to He certain of erring upon the right side, and still 
 theftb remains a prodigious period during which the 
 ancestors of existing coral polypes have been undis- 
 turJSedly at work; and during which, therefore, the 
 climatal conditions over the coral area must have been 
 much what they are now. 
 
 ^.nd all this lapse of time has occurred within the 
 most recent period of the history of the earth. The 
 remains of reefs formed by coral polypes of different 
 k*ftids from those which exist now, enter largely into 
 the composition of the limestones of the Jurassic pe- 
 riod ; and still more widely different coral polypes have 
 contributed their quota to the vast thickness of the 
 carboniferous and Devonian strata. Then as regards 
 the latter group of rocks in America, the high authority 
 already quoted tells us : 
 
 "The Upper Helderberg period is eminently the 
 coral reef period of the palaeozoic ages. Many of the 
 rocks abound in coral, and are as truly coral reefs as 
 the modern reefs of the Pacific. The corals are some- 
 times standing on the rocks in the position they had 
 when growing : others are lying in fragments, as they 
 were broken and heaped by the waves ; and others were 
 reduced to a compact limestone by the finer trituration 
 before consolidation into rock. This compact variety 
 is the most common kind among the coral reef rocks 
 of the present seas ; and it often contains but few dis- 
 tinct fossils, although formed in water that abounded 
 in life. At the fall of the Ohio, near Louisville, there is 
 a magnificent display of the old reef. Hemispherical 
 Favosites, five or six feet in diameter, lie there nearly 
 as perfect as when they were covered by their flower- 
 like polypes; and besides these, there are various
 
 138 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 
 
 branching corals, and a profusion of CyatJwphyllia, or 
 cup-corals." 1 
 
 Thus, in all the great periods of the earth's history 
 of which we know anything, a part of the then living 
 matter has had the form of polypes, competent to sepa- 
 rate from the water of the sea the carbonate of lime 
 necessary for their own skeletons. Grain by grain, and 
 particle by particle, they have built up vast masses of 
 rock, the thickness of which is measured by hundreds 
 of feet, and their area by thousands of square miles. 
 The slow oscillations of the crust of the earth, pro- 
 ducing great changes in the distribution of land and 
 water, have often obliged the living matter of the coral- 
 builders to shift the locality of its operations ; and, by 
 variation and adaptation to these modifications of con- 
 dition, its forms have as often changed. The work it 
 has done in the past is, for the most part, swept away, 
 but fragments remain, and, if there were no other evi- 
 dence, suffice to prove the general constancy of the 
 operations of Nature in this world, through periods of 
 almost inconceivable duration. 
 
 1 Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 272.
 
 NOTES 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 PAGE! 
 
 Autobiography : Huxley's account of this sketch, written 
 in 1889, is as follows: " A man who is bringing out a series 
 of portraits of celebrities, with a sketch of their career at- 
 tached, has bothered me out of my life for something to go 
 with my portrait, and to escape the abominable bad taste of 
 some of the notices, I have done that." 
 
 pre-Boswellian epoch: the time before Boswell. James 
 Boswell (1740-1795) wrote the famous Life of Samuel John- 
 son. Mr. Leslie Stephen declares that this book " became the 
 first specimen of a new literary type." " It is a full-length 
 portrait of a man's domestic life with enough picturesque 
 detail to enable us to see him through the eyes of private 
 friendship. ..." A number of biographers since Boswell 
 have imitated his method; and Leslie Stephen believes 
 that " we owe it in some degree to his example that we 
 have such delightful books as Lockhart's Life of Scott or 
 Mr. Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay." 
 
 " Bene qui latuit, bene vixit " : from Ovid. He who has 
 kept himself well hidden, has lived well. 
 
 PAGE 4 
 
 Prince George of Cambridge : the grandson of King 
 George III, second Duke of Cambridge, and Commander- 
 in-chief of the British Army. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): a celebrated English 
 philosoph2r and powerful advocate of the doctrine of evolu- 
 tion. Spencer is regarded as one of the most profound think- 
 ers of modern times. He was one of Huxley's closest friends. 
 
 PAGE 5 
 
 in partibus iiifidelium : in the domain of the unbelievers. 
 
 PAGES 
 
 "sweet south upon a bed of violets." Cf. Twelfth 
 Night, Act I, sc. i, 1. 5. 
 
 O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
 Stealing and giving odour. 
 
 For the reading " sweet south " instead of " sweet sound," 
 see Rolfe's edition of Twelfth Night. 
 PAGE 7 
 
 " Lehrjahre " : apprenticeship.
 
 NOTES 
 
 Charing Cross School of Medicine : a school connected 
 with the Charing Cross Hospital in the Strand, London. 
 
 PAGE 9 
 
 Nelson : Horatio Nelson, a celebrated English Admiral 
 born in Norfolk, England, 1758, and died on board the Vic- 
 tory at Trafalgar, 1805. It was before the battle off Cape 
 Trafalgar that Nelson hoisted his famous signal, " England 
 expects every man will do his duty." Cf. Tennyson's Ode to 
 the Duke of Wellington, stanza VI, for a famous tribute to 
 Nelson. 
 
 PAGE 11 
 
 middies: abbreviated form for midshipmen. 
 Suites a Buffon : sequels to Buffon. Buffon (1707-1781) 
 was a French naturalist who wrote many volumes on science. 
 Linnean Society : a scientific society formed in 1788 un- 
 der the auspices of several fellows of the Royal Society. 
 Royal Society : The Royal Society for Improving Nat- 
 ural Knowledge; the oldest scientific society in Great Brit- 
 ain, and one of the oldest in Europe. It was founded by 
 Charles II, in 1660, its nucleus being an association of learned 
 men already in existence. It is supposed to be identical with 
 the Invisible College which Boyle mentions in 1646. It was 
 incorporated under the name of The Royal Society in 1661. 
 The publications of the Royal Society are called Philosophi- 
 cal Transactions. The society has close connection with the 
 government, and has assisted the government in various im- 
 portant scientific undertakings among which may be men- 
 tioned Parry's North Pole expedition. The society also 
 distributes 20,000 yearly for the promotion of scientific 
 research. 
 
 PAGE 12 
 
 Rastignac : a character in Le Pere Goriot. At the close of 
 the story Rastignac says, " A nous deux, maintenant " : 
 Henceforth there is war between us. 
 
 Pere Goriot : a novel of Balzac's with a plot similar to 
 King Lear. 
 
 Professor Tyndall (1820-1893): a distinguished British 
 physicist and member of the Royal Society. He explored 
 with Huxley the glaciers of Switzerland. His work in elec- 
 tricity, radiant heat, light and acoustics gave him a fore- 
 most place in science. 
 
 PAGE 13 
 
 Ecclesiastical spirit : the spirit manifested by the clergy 
 of England in Huxley's time against the truths of science. 
 The clergy considered scientific truth to be disastrous to 
 religious truth. Huxley's attitude toward the teaming of 
 religious truth is illuminated by this quotation, which he 
 uses to explain his own position : " I have the fullest conn-
 
 NOTES 
 
 dence that in the reading and explaining of the Bible, what 
 the children will be taught will be the great truths of Chris- 
 tian Life and conduct, which all of us desire they should 
 know, and that no effort will be made to cram into their 
 poor little minds, theological dogmas which their tender age 
 prevents them from understanding." Huxley defines his idea 
 of a church as a place in which, " week by week, services 
 should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract propositions 
 in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal 
 of true, just and pure living; a place in which those who are 
 weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's 
 rest in the contemplation of the higher life which is possible 
 for all, though attained by so few ; a place in which the man 
 of strife and of business should have time to think how 
 small, after all, are the rewards he covets compared with 
 peace and charity." 
 PAGE 14 
 
 New Reformation: Huxley writes: "We are in the midst 
 of a gigantic movement greater than that which preceded 
 and produced the Reformation, and really only the continu- 
 ation of that movement. ... But this organization will be 
 the work of generations of men, and those who further it 
 most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie, and to 
 rest in no verbal delusion." 
 
 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 
 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE (1866) 
 
 PAGE 15 
 
 On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Know- 
 ledge : from Method and Results : also published in Lay 
 Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. 
 
 For the history of the times mentioned in this essay, see 
 Green's Short History of the English People. 
 The very spot : St. Martin's Borough Hall and Public 
 Library, on Charing Cross Road, near Trafalgar Square. 
 Defoe (1661-1731): an English novelist and political writer. 
 On account of his political writings Defoe was sentenced 
 to stand in the pillory, and to be "imprisoned during the 
 Queen's pleasure." During this imprisonment he wrote 
 many articles. Later in life he wrote Robinson Crusoe, The 
 Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, Journal of the 
 Plague Year, and other books less well known. 
 
 PAGE 17 
 
 unholy cursing and crackling wit of the Rochesters 
 and Sedleys : John Wilmot,the second Earl of Rochester, 
 and Sir Charles Sedley,were both friends of Charles II, and 
 iii
 
 NOTES 
 
 were noted for biting wit and profligacy. Green, in his 
 Short History of the English People, thus describes them: 
 " Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles of 
 some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy. 
 Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness 
 of his words made even the porters in the Covent Garden belt 
 him from the balcony when he ventured to address them." 
 Laud: Arch bishop of Canterbury. Laud was born in 1573, and 
 beheaded at London in 1645. He was throughout the reign of 
 Charles I a staunch supporter of the King. He was im- 
 peached by the Long Parliament in 1640 and executed on 
 Tower Hill, in 1645. 
 
 PAGE 18 
 
 selenography : the scientific study of the moon with special 
 reference to its physical condition. 
 
 Torricellian experiment: a reference to the discovery of the 
 principle of the barometer by the Italian, Torricelli, in 1643. 
 Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Bacon endeavored to 
 ' teach that civilization cannot be brought to a high point 
 except as man applies himself to the study of the secrets of 
 nature, and uses these discoveries for inventions which will 
 give him power over his environment. The chief value of 
 the work was that it called attention to the uses of induction 
 and to the experimental study of facts. See Roger's A Stu- 
 dent's History of Philosophy, page 243. 
 
 The learned Dr. Wallis (1616-1703): Dr. Wallis is re- 
 garded as the greatest of Newton's predecessors in mathe- 
 matical history. His works are numerous and are on a great 
 variety of subjects. He was one of the first members of the 
 Royal Society. 
 
 PAGE 19 
 
 " New Philosophy " : Bacon's ideas on science and philoso- 
 phy as set forth in his works. 
 
 Galileo (1564-1642): a famous Italian astronomer. His 
 most noted work was the construction of the thermome- 
 ter and a telescope. He discovered the satellites of Jupiter in 
 1610. In 1610, also, he observed the sun's spots. His views 
 were condemned by the Pope in 1616, and in 1633 he was 
 forced by the Inquisition to abjure the Copernican theory. 
 Royal Society : see note, page 11. 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1721) : a distinguished natural 
 philosopher of England. Newton was elected a member of 
 the Royal Society in 1672. His most important scientific 
 accomplishment was the establishing of the law of universal 
 gravitation. The story of the fall of the apple was first re- 
 lated by Voltaire to whom it was given by Newton's niece. 
 " Philosophical Transactions " : the publications of the 
 Royal Society.
 
 NOTES 
 
 PAGE 20 
 
 Vesalius (1514-1564): a noted Belgian anatomist. 
 Harvey (1578-1657): an English physiologist and anato- 
 mist. He is noted especially for his discovery of the circula- 
 tion of the blood. 
 
 Schoolmen: a term used to designate the followers of 
 scholasticism, a philosophy of dogmatic religion which as- 
 sumed a certain subject-matter as absolute and unquestion- 
 able. The duty of the Schoolman was to explain church 
 doctrine; these explanations were characterized by fine dis- 
 tinctions and by an absence of real content. See Roger's 
 A Student's History of Philosophy; also Baldwin's Dictionary 
 of Philosophy and Psychology. 
 
 Subtle speculations: Selby gives examples from ques- 
 tions discussed by Thomas Aquinas. Whether all angels 
 belong to the same genus, whether demons are evil by 
 nature, or by will, whether they can change one substance 
 into another, . . . whether an angel can move from one 
 point to another without passing through intermediate 
 space. 
 
 "writ in water": an allusion to Keats' request that the 
 words " Here lies one whose name was writ in water " be 
 his epitaph. The words are inscribed on his tomb in the 
 Protestant Cemetery at Rome. 
 
 Lord Brouncker: The first president of the Royal Society 
 after its incorporation in 1662 was Lord Brouncker. 
 revenant : ghost. 
 
 PAGE 22 
 
 Boyle: Robert Boyle (1627-1691): a British chemist and 
 natural philosopher who was noted especially for his discov- 
 ery of Boyle's law of the elasticity of air. 
 Evelyn (1620-1706): an English author and member of 
 the Royal Society. His most important work is the Diary, 
 valuable for the full account which it gives of the manners 
 and customs of the time. 
 
 The Restoration: In English history the reestablishing of 
 the English monarchy with the return of King Charles II in 
 1660 ; by extension the whole reign of Charles II: as, the 
 dramatists of the Restoration. Century Dictionary. 
 
 PAGE 25 
 
 Aladdin's lamps : a reference to the story of the Wonder- 
 ful Lamp in the Arabian Nights. The magic lamp brought 
 marvelous good fortune to the poor widow's son who pos- 
 sessed it. Cf. also Lowell's Aladdin : 
 
 When I was a beggarly boy, 
 
 And lived in a cellar damp, 
 I had not a friend or a toy, 
 But I had Aladdin's lamp;
 
 NOTES 
 
 When I could not sleep for the cold, 
 
 I had fire enough in my brain, 
 And builded, with roofs of gold, 
 
 My beautiful castles in Spain ! 
 
 PAGE 26 
 
 " When in heaven the stars " : from Tennyson's Speci- 
 mens of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse. 
 
 PAGE 28 
 
 "increasing God's honour and bettering man's es- 
 tate " : Bacon's statement of his purpose in writing the 
 Advancement of Learning. 
 
 For example, etc.: could the sentence beginning thus be 
 written in better form? 
 
 PAGE 29 
 
 Rumford (1738-1814) : Benjamin Thompson, Count Rum- 
 ford, an eminent scientist. Rumford was born in America 
 and educated at Harvard. Suspected of loyalty to the King 
 at the time of the revolution, he was imprisoned. Acquitted, 
 he went to England where he became prominent in politics 
 and science. Invested with the title of Count by the Holy 
 Roman Empire, he chose Rumford for his title after the 
 name of the little New Hampshire town where he had 
 taught. He gave a large sum of money to Harvard College 
 to found the Rumford professorship of science. 
 
 PAGE 30 
 
 eccentric: out of the centre. 
 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION (1868) 
 
 PAGE 35 
 
 A Liberal Education: from Science and Education; also 
 published in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. 
 
 PAGE 36 
 
 Ichabod: cf. 1 Sam. iv, 21. 
 
 PAGE 37 
 
 senior wranglership : in Cambridge University, England, 
 one who has attained the first class in the elementary divi- 
 sion of the public examination for honors in pure and mixed 
 mathematics, commonly called the mathematical tripos, those 
 who compose the second rank of honors being designated 
 senior optimes, and those of the third order junior optimes. 
 The student taking absolutely the first place in the mathe- 
 matical tripos used to be called senior wrangler, those fol- 
 lowing next in the same division being respectively termed 
 second, third, fourth, etc., wranglers. Century Dictionary. 
 double-first: any candidate for the degree of Bachelor of 
 Arts in Oxford University who takes first-class honors in both 
 classics and mathematics* is said to have won a double-first.
 
 NOTES 
 
 PAGE 40 
 
 Retzsch (1779-1857) : a well-known German painter and 
 engraver. 
 
 PAGE 42 
 
 Teat- Act: an English statute of 1673. It compelled all 
 persons holding office under the crown to take the oaths of 
 supremacy and of allegiance, to receive the sacrament ac- 
 cording to the usage of the Church of England, and to sub- 
 scribe to the Declaration against Transubstantiation. 
 Poll: an abbreviation and transliteration of ol iro\\ot, "the 
 mob " ; university slang for the whole body of students tak- 
 ing merely the degree of Bachelor of Arts, at Cambridge, 
 pluck: the rejection of a student, after examinations, who 
 does not come up to the standard. 
 
 ON A PIECE OF CHALK 
 
 PAGE 44 
 
 On a Piece of Chalk : a lecture to working-men from Lay 
 Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. 
 
 Needles of the Isle of Wight : the needles are three 
 white, pointed rocks of chalk, resting on dark-colored bases, 
 and rising abruptly from the sea to a height of 100 feet. 
 Baedeker's Great Britain. 
 
 Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head: Lulworth 
 is on the southern coast of England, west of the Isle of 
 Wight: Flamborough Head is on the northeastern coast of 
 England and extends into \he German Ocean. 
 Weald : a name given to an oval-shaped chalk area in Eng- 
 land, beginning near the Straits of Dover, and extending into 
 the counties of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Sussex. 
 
 PAGE 51 
 
 Lieut. Brooke : Brooke devised an apparatus for deep-sea 
 sounding from which the weight necessary to sink the in- 
 strument rapidly, was detached when it reached the bottom. 
 The object was to relieve the strain on the rope caused by 
 rapid soundings. Improved apparatuses have been invented 
 since the time of Brooke. 
 
 Ehrenberg (1795-1876): a German naturalist noted for his 
 studies of Infusoria. 
 
 Bailey of West Point (1811-1857): an American natu- 
 ralist noted for Lis researches in microscopy, 
 enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable: the 
 first Atlantic telegraph-cable between England and America 
 was laid in 1858 by Cyrus W. Field of New York. Messages 
 were sent over it for a few weeks; then it ceased to act. A 
 permanent cable was laid by Mr. Field in 1866.
 
 NOTES 
 
 PAGE 56 
 
 Dr. Wallich (1786-1854) : a Danish botanist and member 
 of the Royal Society. 
 
 Mr. Sorby : President of the Geological Society of Eng- 
 land, and author of many papers on subjects connected with 
 physical geography. 
 
 PAGE 60 
 
 Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875): a British geologist, and 
 one of the first to uphold Darwin's Origin of Species. 
 Echinus: the sea-urchin; an animal which dwells in a 
 spheroidal shell built up from polygonal plates, and covered 
 with sharp spines. 
 
 PAGE 62 
 
 Somme: a river of northern France which flows into the 
 English Channel northeast of Dieppe. 
 
 PAGE 63 
 
 the chipped flints of Hoxne and Amiens: the rude 
 instruments which were made by primitive man were of 
 chipped flint. Numerous discoveries of large flint imple- 
 ments have been made in the north of France, near Amiens, 
 and in England. The first noted flint implements were dis- 
 covered in Hoxne, Suffolk, England, 1797. Cf. Evans' An- 
 cient Stone Implements and Lyell 's Antiquity of Alan. 
 
 PAGE 64 
 
 Rev. Mr. Gunn (1800-1881) : an English naturalist. Mr. 
 Gunn sent from Tasmania a large number of plants and 
 animals now in the British Museum. 
 
 "the whirligig of time ": cf. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 
 Act V, sc. i, 1. 395. 
 
 PAGE 65 
 
 Euphrates and Hiddekel: cf. Genesis ii, 14. 
 
 PAGE 66 
 
 the great river, the river of Babylon : cf . Genesis xv, 18. 
 
 PAGE 72 
 
 Without haste, but without rest: from Goethe's Zahme 
 Xenien. In a letter to his sister, Huxley says: "And then 
 perhaps by the following of my favorite motto, 
 
 " ' Wie das Gestirn, 
 Ohne Hast, 
 Ohne Rast ' 
 
 something may be done, and some of Sister Lizzie's fond 
 imaginations turn out not altogether untrue." The quota- 
 tion entire is as follows : 
 
 Wie das Gestirn, 
 Ohne Hast, 
 Aber ohne Rast, 
 Drehe sich jeder 
 Um die eigne Lust. 
 
 viii
 
 NOTES 
 
 THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 
 
 (1882) 
 
 PAGE 73 
 
 The Principal Subjects of Education : an extract from 
 the essay, Science and Art in Relation to Education, this 
 discussion : " this " refers to the last sentence in the pre- 
 ceding paragraph, in which Huxley says that it will be im- 
 possible to determine the amount of time to be given to the 
 principal subjects of education until it is determined " what 
 the principal subjects of education ought to be." Francis 
 Bacon : cf. note p. 18. 
 
 PAGE 74 
 
 the best chance of being happy : In connection with 
 Huxley's work on the London School Board, his biographer 
 says that Huxley did not regard " intellectual training only 
 from the utilitarian point of view ; he insisted, e. g., on the 
 value of reading for amusement as one of the most valuable 
 uses to hardworked people." 
 
 PAGE 75 
 
 " Harmony in grey " : cf. with 1. 34 in Browning's An- 
 drea del Sarto. 
 
 PAGE 82 
 
 Hobbes (1588-1679): noted for his views of human na- 
 ture and of politics. According to Minto, "The merits as- 
 cribed to his style are brevity, simplicity and precision." 
 Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753): an Irish prelate noted for 
 his philosophical writings and especially for his theory of 
 vision which was the foundation for modern investigations 
 of the subject. " His style has always been esteemed ad- 
 mirable ; simple, felicitous and sweetly melodious. His dia- 
 logues are sustained with great skill." Minto's Manual of 
 English Prose Literature. We have been recently fur- 
 nished with in prose : The Iliad of Homer translated by 
 Lang, Leaf and Myers, the first edition of which appeared 
 in 1882, is probably the one to which Huxley refers The 
 Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang, appeared in 1879. 
 Among the best of the more recent translations of Homer 
 are the Odyssey by George Herbert Palmer ; the Iliad by 
 Arthur S. Way, arid the Odyssey by the same author. 
 
 PAGE 83 
 
 Locke (1G32-17Q4) : an English philosopher of great in-
 
 NOTES 
 
 fluence. His chief work is An Essay Concerning Human 
 Understanding. 
 PAGE 84 
 
 Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit: thus Francis Bacon 
 thought. 
 
 THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGA- 
 TION (1863) 
 
 PAGE 85 
 
 The Method of Scientific Investigation is an extract 
 from the third of six lectures given to workingmen on The 
 Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature in Darwiniana. 
 
 PAGE 86 
 
 these terrible apparatus : apparatus is the form for both 
 the singular and plural; apparatuses is another form for the 
 plural. Incident in one of Moliere's plays : the allusion 
 is to the hero, M. Jourdain in the play, " Le Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme." 
 
 PAGE 90 
 
 these kind: modern writers regard kind as singular. 
 Shakespeare treated it as a plural noun, as " These kind of 
 knaves I knew." 
 
 PAGE 93 
 
 Newton : cf. page 19. Laplace (1749-1827) : a cele- 
 brated French astronomer and mathematician. He is best 
 known for his theory of the formation of the planetary sys- 
 tems, the so-called "nebular hypothesis." Until recently 
 this hypothesis has generally been accepted in its main 
 outlines. It is now being supplanted by the " Spiral Neb- 
 ular Hypothesis " developed by Professors Moulton and 
 Chamberlin of the University of Chicago. See Moulton's 
 Introduction to Astronomy, p. 463. 
 
 ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE (1868) 
 
 PAGE 95 
 
 On the Physical Basis of Life : from Methods and Re- 
 sults; also published in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. 
 " The substance of this paper was contained in a discourse 
 which was delivered in Edinburgh on the evening of Sunday, 
 the 8th of November, 1868 being the first of a series of 
 Sunday evening addresses upon non-theological topics, insti- 
 tuted by the Rev. J. Cranbrook. Some phrases, which could 
 possess only a transitory and local interest, have been omit- 
 ted ; instead of the newspaper report of the Archbishop of 
 York's address, his Grace's subsequently published pam-
 
 NOTES 
 
 phlet On the Limits of Philosophical Inquiry is quoted ; and 
 I have, here and there, endeavoured to express my meaning 
 more fully and clearly than I seein to have done in speak- 
 ing if I may judge by sundry criticisms upon what Iam 
 supposed to have said, which have appeared. But in sub- 
 stance, and, so far as my recollection serves, in form, what 
 is here written corresponds with what was there said." Hux- 
 ley- 
 
 PAGE 96 
 
 Firmer whale : a name given to a whale which has a dor- 
 sal fin. A Fimier whale commonly measures from 60 to 90 
 feet in length. A fortiori : with stronger reason : still more 
 conclusively. 
 
 PAGE 97 
 
 well-known epigram : from Goethe's Venetianische Epi- 
 gramme. The following is a translation of the passage : 
 Why do the people push each other and shout ? They want 
 to work for their living, bring forth children ; and feed them 
 as well as they possibly can. . . . No man can attain to 
 more, however much he may pretend to the contrary. 
 
 PAGE 100 
 
 Maelstroms : a celebrated whirlpool or violent current in 
 the Arctic Ocean, near the western coast of Norway, be- 
 tween the islands of Moskeniiso and Moskeu, formerly sup- 
 posed to suck in and destroy everything that approached it 
 at any time, but now known not to be dangerous except 
 under certain conditions. Century Dictionary. Cf . also Poe's 
 Descent into the Maelstrom. Milne-Edwards (1800-1885) : 
 a French naturalist. His Elements de Zoologie won him a 
 great reputation. 
 
 PAGE 101 
 
 with such qualifications as arises : a typographical 
 error. 
 
 PAGE 104 
 
 De Bary (1831-1888) : a German botanist noted espe- 
 cially for his researches in cryptogamic botany. 
 No Man's Land: Huxley probably intends no specific geo- 
 graphical reference. The expression is common as a desig- 
 nation of some remote and unfrequented locality. 
 
 PAGE 106 
 
 Kuhne (1837-1900) : a German physiologist and professor 
 of science at Amsterdam and Heidelberg. 
 Debemur morti nos nostraque : Horace Ars Poetica, 
 line 63. 
 
 As forests change their foliage year by year, 
 Leaves, that come first, first fall and disappear ; 
 So antique words die out, and in their room,
 
 NOTES 
 
 Others spring up, of vigorous growth and bloom ; 
 Ourselves and all thai ' ours, to death are due, 
 And why should words not be mortal too ? 
 
 Martin's translation. 
 
 PAGE 107 
 
 peau de chagrin : skin of a wild ass. Balzac (1799- 
 1850) : a celebrated French novelist of the realistic school 
 of fiction. 
 
 PAGE 109 
 
 Barmecide feast : the allusion is to a story in the Arabian 
 Nights in which a member of the Barmecide family places 
 a succession of empty dishes before a beggar, pretending 
 that they contain a rich repast. 
 
 PAGE 112 
 
 modus operand! : method of working. 
 
 PAGE 113 
 
 Martinus Scriblerus : a reference to Memoirs of Martinus 
 Scribierus written principally by John Arbuthnot, and pub- 
 lished in 1741. The purpose of the papers is given by War- 
 burton and Spence in the following extracts quoted from 
 the Preface to the Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, 
 Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus in Elwin and 
 Courthope's edition of Pope's works, vol. x, p. 273: 
 
 " Mr. Pope, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Dr. Swift, in conjunction, 
 formed the project of a satire on the abuses of human learn- 
 ing ; and to make it better received, proposed to execute it 
 in the manner of Cervantes (the original author of this 
 species of satire) under a continued narrative of feigned ad- 
 ventures. They had observed that those abuses still kept their 
 ground against all that the ablest and gravest authors could 
 say to discredit them ; they concluded, therefore, the force 
 of ridicule was wanting to quicken their disgrace ; and ridi- 
 cule was here in its place, when the abuses had been already 
 detected by sober reasoning ; and truth in no danger to suf- 
 fer by the premature use of so powerful an instrument." 
 
 " The design of this work, as stated by Pope himself, is to 
 ridicule all the false tastes in learning under the character 
 of a man of capacity enough, that had dipped into every art 
 and science, but injudiciously iu each. It was begun by a 
 club of some of the greatest wits of the age Lord Oxford, 
 the Bishop of Rochester, Pope, Congreve, Swift, Arbuthnot, 
 and others. Gay often held the pen ; and Addison liked it 
 very well, and was not disinclined to come into it." 
 accounted for the operation of the meat-jack : from 
 the paper " To the learned inquisitor into nature, Mai -thins 
 Scriblerus : the society of free thinkers greeting." Elwin 
 and Courthope, Pope's works, vol. ?, p. 332.
 
 NOTES 
 
 PAGE 114 
 
 The remainder of the essay endeavors to meet the charge 
 of materialism. The following is the conclusion : 
 
 " In itself it is of little moment whether we express the 
 phaeuomena of matter in terms of spirit ; or the phaenomena 
 of spirit in terms of matter : matter may be regarded as a 
 form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of 
 matter each statement has a certain relative truth. But 
 with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic 
 terminology is in every way to be preferred. For it con- 
 nects thought with the other phaenomena of the universe, 
 and suggests inquiry into the nature of those physical condi- 
 tions, or concomitants of thought, which are more or less 
 accessible to us, and a knowledge of which may, in future, 
 help us to exercise the same kind of control over the world 
 of thought, as we already possess in respect of the material 
 world ; whereas, the alternative, or spiritualistic, termi- 
 nology is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity 
 and confusion of ideas. 
 
 " Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science 
 advances, the more extensively and consistently will all the 
 phaenomena of Nature be represented by materialistic for- 
 mulae and symbols. But the man of science, who, forgetting 
 the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formu- 
 lae and symbols into what is commonly understood by mate- 
 rialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the 
 mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with 
 which he works his problems, for real entities and with 
 this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathema- 
 tician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical 
 consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may 
 paralyze the energies and destroy the beauty of a life." 
 
 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS (1870) 
 
 PAGE 115 
 
 On Coral and Coral Reefs : from Critiques and Addresses. 
 The essay was published in 1870. Sic et curalium : Thus 
 also the coral, as soon as it touches the air turns hard. 
 It was a soft plant under the water. Boccone (1633- 
 1704) : a noted Sicilian naturalist. 
 
 PAGE 116 
 
 Marsigli (1658-1730): an Italian soldier and naturalist. He 
 wrote A Physical History of the Sea. " Trait du Corail ": 
 " I made the coral bloom in vases full of sea-water, and I 
 noticed that what we believe to be the flower of this so- 
 called plant was in reality only an insect similar to a little
 
 NOTES 
 
 nettle or polype. I had the pleasure to see the paws or feet 
 of this nettle move, and having placed the vase full of 
 water in which the coral was, near the fire, at a moderate 
 heat, all the little insects expanded, the nettle stretched 
 out its feet and formed what M. de Marsigli and I had 
 taken for the petals of the flower. The calyx of this so- 
 called flower is the very body of the animal issued from its 
 cell." 
 PAGE 117 
 
 Reaumur (1683-1757): a French physiologist and nat- 
 uralist, best known as the inventor of the Re'aumur thermom- 
 eter. He was a member of the French Academy of Science. 
 Bishop Wilson : Thomas Wilson (1663-1755), bishop of 
 the Isle of Man. Details of his life are given in the folio 
 edition of his works (1782). An appreciation of his religious 
 
 writings is given by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anar- 
 chy. Bishop Wilson's words, " To make reason and the will 
 of God prevail," are the theme of Arnold's essay, Sweetness 
 and Light. An eminent modern writer : Matthew Ar- 
 nold (1822-1888), eldest son of Thomas Arnold, headmas- 
 ter of Rugby ; a distinguished critic and poet, and professor 
 of poetry at Oxford. The allusion is to Arnold's essay, Stceet- 
 nesn and Light. The phrase, " sweetness and light," is one 
 which -<Esop uses in Swift's Battle of the Books to sum up the 
 superiority of the ancients over the moderns. " As for us, the 
 ancients, we are content, with the bee, to pretend to nothing 
 of our own beyond our wings and our voice, that is to say, 
 our flights and our language ; for the rest, whatever we have 
 got has been by infinite labor and search, and ranging 
 through every corner of nature ; the difference is, that in- 
 stead of dirt and poison we have rather chose to fill our 
 hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the 
 two noblest things, which are sweetness and light." Arnold's 
 purpose in the essay is to define the cultured man as one 
 who endeavors to make beauty and intelligence prevail 
 everywhere. 
 
 PAGE 118 
 
 Abbe" Tr e/ mbley (1700-1784): a Swiss naturalist. He 
 wrote "Memoires pour servir a Phistoire d'un genre de 
 polypes d'eau doiice, a bras en forme de comes." Bernard 
 de Jussieu (1699-1776): a French botanist; founder of 
 the natural classification of plants. He was superintendent of 
 the Trianon Gardens. Guettard (1715-1786): a French 
 naturalist. 
 
 PAGE 124 
 
 Monte Nuovo within the old crater of Somma : Monte 
 Nuovo, a mountain west of Naples ; Somma, a mountain
 
 NOTES 
 
 north of Vesuvius which with its lofty, semicircular cliff en- 
 circles the active cone of Vesuvius. 
 
 PAGE 126 
 
 Mauritius : an island in the Indian Ocean ; Huxley visited 
 the island when on the voyage with the Rattlesnake. He 
 wrote to his mother of his visit : " This island is, you know, 
 the scene of Saint Pierre's beautiful story of Paul and 
 Virginia, over which I suppose most people have sentimen- 
 talized at one time or another of their lives. Until we reached 
 here I did not know that the tale was like the lady's im- 
 prover a fiction founded on fact, and that Paul and Vir- 
 ginia were at one time flesh and blood, and that their verit- 
 able dust was buried at Pamplemousses in a spot consid- 
 ered as one of the lions of the place, and visited as classic 
 ground." 
 
 PAGE 130 
 
 Mr. Darwin's coral reefs: The Structure and Distribution 
 of Coral Reefs, published in 1848. 
 
 PAGE 134 
 
 Professor Jukes (1811-1869) : an English geologist. 
 
 PAGE 136 
 
 Mr. Dana (1813-1895) : a well-known American geologist 
 and mineralogist ; a professor at Yale from 1845. He wrote 
 a number of books among which is Coral and Coral Reefs. 
 
 PAGE 137 
 
 Jurassic period : that part of the geological series which 
 is older than the Cretaceous and newer than the Triassic ; 
 so called from the predominance of rocks of this age in the 
 Jura Mountains. The three great divisions of fossiliferous 
 rocks are called the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Creta- 
 
 REFERENCE BOOKS 
 
 The following reference books are suggested for a more com- 
 plete treatment of various points in the text : 
 Andrews' History of England. 
 Green's Short History of the English People. 
 Traill's Social England. 
 Roger's A Student's History of Philosophy. 
 Royce's The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. 
 Huxley's Life and Letters. 
 
 Smalley's Mr. Huxley, in Scribner's Magazine for October, 1905. 
 Darwin's Life and Letters.
 
 COLLEGE ENTRANCE 
 REQUIREMENTS 
 
 College Entrance Requirements for Careful Study for the Years 1911-1915 inclusive. 
 In one volume. Cloth, crown 8vo. $i.oo,net. 
 
 The text and notes throughout correspond exactly with the separate issues of these 
 titles in the Riverside Literature Series. 
 
 Contents : Burke's Conciliation with the Colonies ; Carlyle's Essay on Burns ; Macau- 
 lay's Life of Johnson ; Milton's Minor Poems ; Shakespeare's Macbeth ; Tenny- 
 son's Gareth and Lynette, and Other Idylls; Washington's Farewell Address; 
 Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration. 
 
 COLLEGE ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS 
 
 IN THE RIVERSIDE LITERATURE SERIES 
 The Numbers in parentheses refer to the Riverside Literature Series. 
 
 FOR READING, 1911 
 
 I (two to be selected). Shakespeare's As You Like It (<, ^ ; Henry V (163) ; Julius 
 
 Cassar (67); Merchant of Venice (55); Twelfth Night (149). 
 
 II (one to be selected). Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley Papers (60, 61) ; Bacon's 
 Essays (177); Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Part I (109); Franklin's Autobi- 
 ography (19, 20). 
 
 III (one to be selected) Chaucer's Prologue (135); Goldsmith's Deserted Village 
 (68) ; tPalgrave's Golden Treasury (First Series), Books II and III ; Port's Rape 
 of the Lock (147); Spenser's Faerie Queene Selections (160). 
 
 IV (two to be selected) FBlackmore's Lorna Doone ; Dickens's Tale of Two Cities 
 (161); Eliot's Silas Marner (83); Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford (192); Goldsmith's 
 Vicar of Wakefield (78) , Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (91) ; Scott's 
 Ivanhoe (86) ; Scott's Quentin Durward (165) ; Thackeray's Henry Esmond (140). 
 
 V (two to be selected). Carlyle's Heroes and Hero- Worship (166) ; De Quincey's 
 Joan of Arc, and the English Mail-Coach (164); Emerson's Essays (selected) (171, 
 172); Irving's Sketch Book, Selected Essays (51, 52); Lamb's Essays of Elia 
 selected (170); Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (142). 
 
 VI (two to be selected) Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (132) ; Browning's Selected 
 Poems (115); Byron's Mazeppa, and Prisoner of Chillon (189); Coleridge's Rime 
 of the Ancient Mariner (So) ; Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish (2) ; Low- 
 ell's Vision of Sir Launfal(3o); Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (45); tPal- 
 grave's Golden Treasury (First Series), Book IV; Poe's Poems (119); Scott's 
 Lady of the Lake (53) ; Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, and 
 The Passing of Arthur (156). 
 
 FOR READING, igia 
 
 The same literature as for 1909-1911 with the following exceptions : 
 In Group V, Carlyle's "The Hero as Poet," "The Hero as Man of Letters," and 
 "The Hero as King" (166) are substituted for " Heroes and Hero- Worship," com- 
 plete. In Group VI, Tennyson's Princess (i 1 1) is substituted for Gareth and Lynette, 
 etc. (156). 
 
 FOR READING, 1913-1915 
 
 With a view to large freedom of choice, the books provided for reading are arranged in 
 the following groups, from which at least ten units are to be selected, two from each 
 group. Each unit is set off by semicolons 
 
 I The Old Testament ; the Odyssey (190), with the omission, if desired, of Book,' 
 814 a
 
 I-V and XV-XVII ; the tlliad, with the omission, if desired, of Books XI, XIIl- 
 XV, XVII, XXI ; the /Eneid (193). For any unit of this group a unit from any 
 other group may be substituted. 
 
 II Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (55); Midsummer Night's Dream (153); As 
 You Like It (93); Twelfth Night (149) ; Henry the Fifth (163) ; Julius Caesar (67). 
 
 HI Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Part I (87); Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (78); 
 either Scott's Ivanhoe (86) or Scott's Quentin Durward (165) ; Hawthorne'r 
 House of the Seven Gables (91) ; either tDickens's David Copperfield or Dickens's 
 Tale of Two Cities (161); Thackeray's Henry Esmond (140); Mrs. Gaskell's 
 Cranford (192) ; George Eliot's Silas Marner (83) ; tStevenson's Treasure Island. 
 
 IV Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Part I (109); The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers in 
 the Spectator (60-61); Franklin's Autobiography (19-20) (condensed); Irving's 
 Sketch Book (51-52); Macaulay's Essays on Lord Ciive and Warren Hastings; 
 fThackeray's English Humorists ; Selections from Lincoln (32), memoir or esti- 
 mate (133 and 185); tParkman's Oregon Trail; either Thoreau's Walden or Hux- 
 ley's Autobiography and selections from Lay Sermons (187 and 188) , -(Stevenson's 
 Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey 
 
 V tPalgrave's Golden Treasury (First Series), Books II and III ; Gray's Elegy in a 
 Country Churchyard (74) and Goldsmith's Deserted Village (68); Coleridge's 
 Ancient Mariner (80) ; and Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal (30) ; Scott's Lady of the 
 Lake (53); Byron's Childe Harold, Canto IV, and Prisoner of Chillon (189); tPal- 
 grave's Golden Treasury (First Series), Book IV; Poe's Raven (ng); Longfel- 
 low's Courtship of Miles Standish (2), and Whittier's Snow- Bound (4) ; Macau- 
 lay's Lays of Ancient Rome (45), ana Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (132); Tenny- 
 son's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, and The Passing of Arthur (156); 
 Browning, Selected Poems (115). 
 
 FOR STUDY, 1911 
 
 Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America (100) or Washington's Farewell Ad- 
 dress and Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration (190); Macaulay's Life of John- 
 son (102) or Carlyle's Essay on Burn* (105); Milton's Minor Poems (72) ; Shake- 
 speare's Macbeth (106). 
 
 FOR STUDY, igra 
 
 In this group, Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, and The Passing 
 of Arthur (156) are added as an alternative for Milton's Minor Poems (72). The 
 other literature is the same as for 1910-1911. 
 
 FOR STUDY, 1913-1915 
 
 Shakespeare's Macbeth (106) ; Milton's L' Allegro, II Penseroso, and Comus (72) ; either 
 Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America (100) or both Washington's Fare- 
 well Address and Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration (190); either Macaulay's 
 Life of Johnson (102) or Carlyle's Essay on Burns (105). 
 
 tNot published in the Riverside Literature Series. 
 
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