Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
The regular lectures, fifty-seven in number, ran from February to April
and from April to June, with fortnightly examinations during the latter
period, six in number. I take the scheme from his notebook:--] "After
prolegomena, the physiology and morphology of lobster and dove; then
through Invertebrates, Anodon, Actinia, and Vorticella Protozoa, to
Molluscan types. Insects, then Vertebrates. Supplemented
Paleontologically by the demonstrations of the selected types in the
cases; twelve Paleozoic, twelve Mesozoic and Cainozoic," [by his
assistants.] "To make the course complete there should be added
1. A series of lectures on Species, practical discrimination and
description, modification by conditions and distribution;
2. Lectures on the elements of Botany and Fossil Plants."
[This reorganisation of his course went hand in hand with his
utilisation of the Jermyn Street Museum for paleontological teaching,
and all through 1857 he was busily working at the Explanatory Catalogue.
Moreover, in 1855 he had begun at Jermyn Street his regular courses of
lectures to working men--lectures which impressed those qualified to
judge as surpassing even his class lectures. Year after year he gave the
artisans of his best, on the principle enunciated thus early in a letter
of February 27, 1855, to Dyster:--]
I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures (POPULAR Lectures I
hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about to give here. I want
the working classes to understand that Science and her ways are great
facts for them--that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that
they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest--not because fellows
in black with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and
patent laws of nature which they must obey "under penalties."
I am sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do
with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts. You will be with
me, I know.
[And again on May 6, 1855:--]
I am glad your lectures went off so well. They were better attended than
mine [the Preliminary Course], although in point of earnestness and
attention my audience was all I could wish. I am now giving a course of
the same kind to working men exclusively--one of what we call our series
of "working men's lectures," consisting of six given in turn by each
Professor. The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full.
I believe in the fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount
of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I
would willingly give some when I come to Tenby.
[The corresponding movement set going by F.D. Maurice also claimed his
interest, and in 1857 he gave his first address at the Working Men's
College to an audience, as he notes, of some fifty persons, including
Maurice himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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