=Advocacy of the Sciences by Huxley and Others.=--Another great popularizer of the scientific elements in education, who also stressed the value of the sciences for ‘complete living’ and social progress, was Thomas H. Huxley (Fig. 53). His use of English was vigorous and epigrammatic, and he showed great skill in bringing his conclusions into such simple language that the most unscientific persons could understand them. Especially in an address on _A Liberal Education_ before a ‘workingmen’s college,’ he has most forcefully depicted the value of the sciences and other modern subjects in training for concrete living, and ridiculed the ineffectiveness of the current classical education. He maintains that “the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us depend upon our knowing something of the phenomena of the universe and the laws of Nature. And yet this is what people tell to their sons: ‘At the cost of from one to two thousand pounds of our hard-earned money, we devote twelve of the most precious years of your life to school. There you shall not learn one single thing of all those you will most want to know directly you leave school and enter upon the practical business of life.’” Instead of this, “the middle class school substitutes what is usually comprised under the compendious title of the ‘classics’--that is to say, the languages, the literature, and the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the geography of so much of the world as was known to these two great nations of antiquity.” Thus “the British father denies his children all the knowledge they might turn to account in life, not merely for the achievement of vulgar success, but for guidance in the great crises of human existence.” [Sidenote: Combe.] [Sidenote: Youmans.] [Sidenote: Eliot.]