Autobiography and Selected EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Autobiography and Selected Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as
forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge
of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her
operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire,
but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others
as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely;
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.
ON A PIECE OF CHALK [57]
If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the
diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance
almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as
"chalk."
Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well-sinker
might carry his shaft down many hundred feet without coming to the end
of the chalk; and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared away
the face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high
cliffs are often wholly formed of the same material. Northward, the
chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it appears
abruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into
the Needles of the Isle of Wight;[58] while on the shores of Kent it
supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name
of Albion.
Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band
of white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be followed
diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head
[59] in Yorkshire--a distance of over two hundred and eighty miles as
the crow flies.
From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and the Channel, on the
South, the chalk is largely hidden by other deposits; but, except in the
Weald [60] of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all
the south-eastern counties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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