< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Baltimore are Prof. Huxley's few words of advice on "buildings." "Get an honest bricklayer, and make him build you just such rooms as you really want, leaving ample space for extension." When

"you have endowed all the professors you need, and built all the laboratories that are wanted, and have the best museum and the finest library that can be imagined; then, if you have a few hundred thousand dollars you don't know what to do with, send for an architect, and tell him to put up a façade. If American is similar to English experience, any other course will probably lead you into having some stately structure, good for your architect's fame, but not in the least what you want."

The South Kensington lecture contains some strong pleading for the study of Biology, as a subject of deep importance to the community. Among other illustrations of its importance it is urged that thereby alone are men able to form something like a rational conception of what constitutes valuable criticism of the teachings of biologists. "Brilliant articles" are from time to time written by "paper-philosophers" devoid of even the elements of biological knowledge, and the teachings of biologists are demolished, while the weathercock heads among us are. Prof. Huxley tells us, much exercised by the "winds of doctrine" let loose in the said articles. Turning, however, to his favorite storehouse of metaphor, he finds that the brilliancy of the writers "is like the light given out by the crackling of thorns under a pot, of which Solomon speaks." Solomon makes use of the-image for purposes of comparison, but Prof. Huxley politely abstains from proceeding further into detail.

The study of Biology which is here advocated is practical study of the actual phenomena presented by plants and animals.

"Nobody will ever know anything about biology, except in a dilettante 'paper-philosopher' way, who contents himself with reading books on botany, zoölogy, and the like; and the reason of this is simple and easy to understand. It is that all language is merely symbolical of the things of which it treats; the more complicated the things, the more bare is the symbol, and the more its verbal definition requires to be supplemented by the information derived directly from the handling, and the seeing, and the touching, of the thing symbolized—that is really what is at the bottom of the whole matter. . . . You may read any quantity of books, and you may be almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of Nature."

The rationale of the demand for practical teaching in all branches of science—a demand to which it is exceedingly difficult to get those who have the direction of educational institutions in this country to accede—has never been stated with more simple force than in the above extract.

Like all his writings, this last volume by Prof. Huxley presents

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