His lectures (writes Jeffery Parker) were like his writings, luminously clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing as to win a battle. He was an admirable draughtsman, and his blackboard illustrations were always a great feature of his lectures, especially when, to show the relation of two animal types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and smudges, evolve the one into the other before our eyes. He seemed to have a real affection for some of the specimens illustrating his lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving manner; when he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes throw his arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him and take its hand, as if its silent companionship were an inspiration. To me his lectures before his small class at Jermyn Street or South Kensington were almost more impressive than the discourses at the Royal Institution, where for an hour and a half he poured forth a stream of dignified, earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without the assistance of a note. Another description is from the pen of an old pupil in the autumn of 1876, Professor H. Fairfield Osborn, of Columbia College:-- Huxley, as a teacher, can never be forgotten by any of his students. He entered the lecture-room promptly as the clock was striking nine (In most years the lectures began at ten.), rather quickly, and with his head bent forward "as if oppressive with its mind." He usually glanced attention to his class of about ninety, and began speaking before he reached his chair. He spoke between his lips, but with perfectly clear analysis, with thorough interest, and with philosophic insight which was far above the average of his students. He used very few charts, but handled the chalk with great skill, sketching out the anatomy of an animal as if it were a transparent object. As in Darwin's face, and as in Erasmus Darwin's or Buffon's, and many other anatomists with a strong sense of form, his eyes were heavily overhung by a projecting forehead and eyebrows, and seemed at times to look inward. His lips were firm and closely set, with the expression of positiveness, and the other feature which most marked him was the very heavy mass of hair falling over his forehead, which he would frequently stroke or toss back. Occasionally he would light up the monotony of anatomical description by a bit of humour.