Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

The body of man and the processes of life, in the earlier part of the century, were almost as unknown to most people as were the structure of the earth and the great processes of nature. What was known of human anatomy and physiology was contained in ponderous treatises, written in difficult and technical language suitable only for students of medicine and doctors. It was thought to be not only unnecessary but slightly coarse for those not in the profession to know anything of the viscera of digestion, circulation, and so forth. Huxley laid low this great superstition by his Elementary Lessons in Physiology, a little volume first published in 1866, which ran through many editions. In it he wrote primarily for teachers and learners in boys' and girls' schools, and selected from the great bulk of knowledge and opinion called human physiology only the important and well-established truths. So successful was he in his selection that, notwithstanding the immense increase in knowledge since he wrote, the book still remains an adequate and useful elementary treatise, and by this time must have given their main knowledge of the human body to hundreds and thousands of readers who otherwise would have remained ignorant.

The books of which we have been writing were addressed to the general public, but, in addition, Huxley wrote several, of which three are specially important, for those students who devote themselves specially to anatomy. The Crayfish, his famous volume in the International Scientific Series, has been called by Professor Howes, the assistant and successor of Huxley at the Royal College of Science, "probably the best biological treatise ever written." Many naturalists have written elaborate monographs on single animals: Lyonet worked for years on the willow caterpillar, Strauss Durckheim devoted an even minuter attention to the common cockchafer, and the great Bojanus investigated almost every fibre in the structure of the tortoise. The volumes produced by these anatomists were valuable and memorable, and occupy an honoured place in the library of science, but Huxley's aim was wider and greater. He showed how careful study of one of the commonest and most insignificant of animals leads, step by step, from every-day knowledge to the widest generalisations and the most difficult problems of zoölogy. He made study of a single creature an introduction to a whole science, and taught students to regard any form of life not merely as a highly complicated and deeply interesting anatomical study, but as a creature that is only one out of an innumerable host of living things, every fibre in its body, every rhythm in its functions proclaiming the degree and nature of its relationship to other animals. R. Louis Stevenson, writing of his native town, tried to give "a vision of Edinburgh, not as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round world, with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways radiate, or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire." It is this wider sweep, this attempt to see and to teach not merely the facts about things but the relations of these facts to the similar facts in other things, that makes the difference between the new knowledge and the old. The questions to be asked and answered are not merely, What are the structures in this animal? but, How and why do they come to be what they are? Huxley was a ruthless enemy of the books and teachers which or who made the mere acquisition of details of knowledge their chief object.

"I remember," he wrote, "in my youth there were detestable books which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned by heart, of this sort, 'What is a horse? The horse is termed Equus caballus; belongs to the class Mammalia; order, Pachydermata; family, Solidungula.' Was any human being the wiser for learning that magic formula? Was he not more foolish inasmuch as he was deluded into taking words for knowledge?"

Huxley himself admitted his difficulty in remembering apparently meaningless facts, and occasionally aided his memory by inventing for them a humorous significance. Professor Howes relates a story of this kind. While examining the papers of candidates for some examination, Huxley came across one in which the mitral or bicuspid valve of the heart was erroneously described as being placed in the right cavity. "Poor little beggar," said Huxley; "I never could get them myself until I reflected that a bishop could never be in the right." This insistence on the uselessness of formal knowledge applied only to those who were being taught or who were learning from books or lectures. Of the value and discipline of knowledge of facts gained at first hand from objects themselves either in original investigation or with the aid of books, Huxley had the highest possible opinion. By such a method of work alone he believed it possible to distinguish what we believe on authority from what we have convinced ourselves to be true, and, as we shall see later, he regarded it as the most important duty of a man to have acquired the habit of classifying the mass of ideas in his brain into those which he knew and those which he thought to be true from having read or heard or imagined them.

The two other of the three great treatises for anatomical students are the Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals, published in 1871, and the Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals, published in 1877. Of these two volumes it is sufficient to say that they formed the chief introduction to the study of animal zoölogy for many years, and that a large number of the best-known zoölogists of the end of this century received from them their first instruction in the science. As text-books they have been superseded lately by larger volumes in which there is found more space for some of the recent advances in knowledge, especially comparative embryology, and the more intricate knowledge of the structure of the soft parts of marine invertebrates made possible by the newer and more successful methods of preserving delicate tissues. Just before Huxley ceased his regular work as a teacher at the Royal College of Science, there arrived a series of marine embryos, beautifully preserved and prepared for microscopic work by the zoölogists at the International Zoölogical Station at Naples. Huxley is reported to have exclaimed at their beauty, and to have said: "You young men cannot realise your advantages; you have brought to you for study at your leisure in London, creatures that I had to lash my microscope to the mast to get a glimpse of." Huxley's books were written for students with fewer advantages, and, naturally, laid more stress on the harder skeletal parts and such structures as could be more easily preserved; but with this inevitable limitation they still serve as luminous and comprehensive guides to the subjects of which they treat. There is no doubt but that if he had been a younger man when the new technical methods made their appearance, he would have adopted them and their results in his volumes. One of the first great pieces of work which utilised methods more like those now used in all laboratories than those employed during the greater part of Huxley's life as a teacher was the classical investigation by Van Beneden into the changes in the egg of Ascaris which accompany the process of fertilisation. When Huxley read the memoir he exclaimed, "All this by the use of glacial acetic acid—is it possible!" At once, Professor Howes relates, he repeated the whole investigation himself, and, when satisfied, declared that the "history of the histological investigation of the future would be the history of its methods." Not only have the chemical substances used in preparing tissues for examination greatly increased since Huxley's time as an active worker, but a very important method of investigation has come into general use. In Huxley's time tissues or animals too large or too opaque to be examined microscopically as whole structures were either teased by needles or were cut with a razor by hand into comparatively thick slices. The process of cutting, however practised the operator, was tedious and uncertain, and it was almost impossible to cut a piece of tissue into a series of thin slices without losing or destroying considerable portions. Microtomes, with various accessory mechanical appliances, have now been invented, and by means of these not only are slices of great tenuity made with ease, but there is little difficulty in cutting the most delicate organism into a ribbon of consecutive slices. Such new methods have made almost a revolution in the study of zoölogy, particularly of the lower forms of life and of the embryonic stages of higher animals, and books written before these methods became common have naturally been superseded.

Huxley did far more for the teaching of science than the preparation of books, however useful these were. He was the practical inventor of the laboratory system of teaching zoölogical science, and all over the world the methods invented by him have been adopted in university laboratories and technical schools. He had always declared that since zoölogy was a physical science, the method of studying it must needs be analogous to that which is followed in other physical sciences. If a man wishes to be a chemist, it is necessary not only that he should read chemical books and attend chemical lectures, but that he should actually perform the fundamental experiments in the laboratory for himself, and thus learn exactly what the words which he reads in his books and hears from his teachers, mean. "If you want a man to be a tea-merchant, you don't tell him to read books about China or about tea, but you put him into a tea-merchant's office where he has the handling, the smelling, and the tasting of tea. Without the sort of knowledge which can be gained only in this practical way, his exploits as a tea-merchant will soon come to a bankrupt termination." The great and obvious difficulty in the practical teaching of biology appeared to be the immense number of different kinds of animals and plants in existence. A human life would not suffice for the examination of a hundredth part of these. Huxley met the difficulty by the "type" system.

"There are certainly more than 100,000 species of insects, and yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen one, will be able to have a fair conception of the structure of the whole. I do not mean to say he will know that structure thoroughly, or as well as is desirable that he should know it; but he will have enough real knowledge to enable him to understand what he reads, to have genuine images in his mind of these structures which become so variously modified in all the forms of insects he has not seen. In fact, there are such things as types of form among animals and vegetables, and for the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what constitutes the leading modifications of animal and plant life, it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small number of animals and plants."

The type system in itself was not absolutely new. Rolleston, the Linacre professor at Oxford, in his Forms of Animal Life had devised the method of teaching comparative anatomy by the study of a graded series of animals. But his method depended on the existence of a series of dissections and preparations made by a skilled craftsman; the tradition of teaching by authority instead of by investigation was maintained, although the authority of books and lectures was aided by museum specimens in glass bottles, the actual basis of the book being a series of dissections prepared by Mr. Charles Robertson, Rolleston's laboratory assistant, for the great International Exhibition of 1861. The authorities of Huxley's students were to be found in nature itself. The green scum from the nearest gutter, a handful of weed from a pond, a bean-plant, some fresh-water mud, a frog, and a pigeon were the ultimate authorities of his course. His students were taught how to observe them, and how to draw and record their observations. However familiar the objects, each student had to verify every fact afresh for himself. The business of the teacher was explanation of the methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of verification. It was a training in the immemorial attitude of the scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an integral part in national education.

As a matter of fact it was comparatively late in his life as a teacher that Huxley had complete opportunity for putting into practice his scheme for the laboratory teaching of biology. In 1854 there was no laboratory attached to the Natural History Department of the School of Mines. Lectures alone were given, and the only opportunity the student had of any practical acquaintance with the facts was in a short interview with the professor at the lecture table after the lecture. This condition continued practically to 1872. But a few years before that Huxley and his colleagues got up a kind of pronunciamento deploring the existing state of affairs. In his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1870 Huxley said: "There is a complete want in the School of Mines, as it now exists, of any means of teaching several of the subjects practically. For example, I am set there to teach natural history without a biological laboratory and without the means of shewing a single dissection." Against strong internal opposition and at considerable pecuniary loss Huxley and some of his colleagues succeeded, in 1872, in getting the School of Mines transferred to South Kensington, where it became the Royal College of Science. For the first course of instruction given in the new buildings, Huxley obtained the aid of Prof. M. Foster, Prof. Rutherford, and Prof. Ray Lankester. The laboratory course originated by Huxley and shaped by him with these three distinguished assistants became the model of the regular courses given subsequently, and, with various slight modifications, has since been adopted almost universally. Later on, Huxley described it as follows:

"I lecture to a class of students daily for about four months and a half, and my class have, of course, their text-books; but the essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I regard as really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instruments, and we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amœba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite conception, by means of sense images, of the characteristic structure of each of the leading modifications of the animal kingdom; and that is perfectly possible by going no further than the length of that list of forms which I have enumerated. If a man knows the structure of the animals I have mentioned, he has a clear and exact, however limited apprehension of the essential features of the organization of all those great divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned severally belong. And it then becomes possible to him to read with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a structure, he has a definite image in his mind of what the name means in the particular creature he is reading about, and therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere repetition of words; but every term employed in the description, we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a modification of that which he has seen."