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Page 24
Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as
organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did
not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to
him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he
refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.
Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], that of master
of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears
to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British
matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I
do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I
possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as
arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate
all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's,
or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it
altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire
of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the
kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit
of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am,
and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever
proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned,
thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but
do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own
laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions
the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.
In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught
as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn
from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized
common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the
ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative
to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until
adequate proof is forthcoming.
XI
METHODS OF WORK
Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his
insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by
others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not
only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested
him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself
before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of
spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations
was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great
trouble in the Navy--namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully
prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were
opened, to be full of maggots.
His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections
by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the
essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in
very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid
draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing
a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most
striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted
audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex
structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from
one form to the next.
Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was
continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms.
Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates
and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of
special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds
and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast
number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at
South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which,
in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and
which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special
groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was
suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution
to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the
Mammalia" (1880)--"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of
his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world
of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions
(begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist)
which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done
more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of
our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all
time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory
systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs
still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could
no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon
zoological work before he was sixty.
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