Twenty years later he supported the entry of women into public life in a plainly reasoned letter, which he himself thought highly complimentary, although a number of estimable ladies flew at him for writing it:—
The best of women are apt to be a little weak in the great practical arts of give-and-take and putting up with a beating, and a little too strong in their belief in the efficacy of government. Men learn about these things in the ordinary course of their business; women have no chance in home life, and the boards and councils will be capital schools for them. Again, in the public interest it will be well; women are more naturally economical than men, and have none of our false shame about looking after pence. Moreover, they don't job for any but their lovers, husbands, and children, so that we know the worst.
Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.
Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], that of master of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's, or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned, thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.
In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until adequate proof is forthcoming.
XI
METHODS OF WORK
Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great trouble in the Navy—namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were opened, to be full of maggots.
His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from one form to the next.
Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms. Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which, in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the Mammalia" (1880)—"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions (begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist) which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon zoological work before he was sixty.