uths, along with
puff-writers and similar experts.

X

EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY OF TEACHERS AND OF WOMEN

The third of his excursions into the field of education, in his
burning desire to give the people that right knowledge for want of
which they perish, was the training of the teachers who prepared
pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department. The
future of scientific teaching depended upon the proper supply of
trained teachers. Now, the School of Mines in Jermyn Street was
without a laboratory in which to make even his own students work out
with their own hands the structure of the biological "types" expounded
in the lectures. An opportunity to train these new "scientific
missionaries" came in 1871, when he was deep in the great schemes of
elementary education. More than a hundred of them flocked to South
Kensington, where some large rooms on the ground floor of the museum
had been secured and rigged up for the purpose by the Professor and
his three demonstrators. For six weeks in the summer there was a
daily lecture, followed by four hours' laboratory work under the
demonstrators, in which the students verified for themselves facts
which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate
pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of
the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One
clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the
Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under
the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture
in Huxley's _Physiology_."

From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new
buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his
own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able
to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses--a
method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle.
The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify
every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand.
The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each
representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one
with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations.
Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and
proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order,
it had the disadvantages of requirin