ter. 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 zooelogy. 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 place