Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And WorkMitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Science
Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
Mitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895
The second great point in which a modern writer would amend Huxley's
statement of the case is more purely anatomical. One result of
Darwin's work has been that anatomists attend much more closely to the
slight variations of anatomical structure to be found among
individuals of the same species. A comparison between an individual
human body and the body of an individual gorilla is not now considered
sufficient. The comparison must be made between the results of
dissection of a very large number of men and of a very large number of
gorillas. The anatomy of a type is not the anatomy of an individual;
it is a kind of central point around which there oscillate the
variations presented by the individuals belonging to the type. So far
as this newer method has been applied, it has been found that the
variations of the gorilla type frequently, in the case of individual
organs, overlap the variations of the human type, and that the
structure of man differs from the structure of any anthropoid type
only in that the abstract central point of its variations is slightly
different from the abstract central point of the variations presented
by individual orangs, gorillas, and chimpanzees.
CHAPTER X
SCIENCE AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION
Science-Teaching Fifty Years Ago--Huxley's Insistence on
Reform--Science Primers--Physiography--Elementary
Physiology--_The Crayfish_--Manuals of Anatomy--Modern
Microscopical Methods--Practical Work in Biological
Teaching--Invention of the Type System--Science in Medical
Education--Science and Culture.
Less than half a century ago, there was practically no generally
diffused knowledge of even the elements of science and practically no
provision for teaching it. Medical students, in the course of their
professional education, received some small instruction in botany,
chemistry, and physiology; in the greater universities of England and
the Continent there were not in all a dozen professorships of science
apart from special branches of medicine; in the Scottish universities
there were one or two dreamy chairs of "Natural and Civil History,"
the occupiers of which were supposed to dispense instruction in half a
dozen sciences. There was no scientific teaching at the public
schools; there were practically no books available for beginners in
science, and even the idea of guides to laboratory work had not been
invented. Huxley, addressing in 1854 a particularly select audience in
St. Martin's Hall, London, spoke to them of the
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