Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/358

326 . If these conclusions, arrived at and expressed in the following chapters, do not meet the full concurrence of economists, the writer has the satisfaction of knowing that they received, in the main, the full indorsement of one so pre-eminently qualified to pass judgment upon them.



T was my pleasant fortune, a few years back, to have my name enrolled with a limited few in the registry book of the Royal School of Mines in London, destined for work at one of the ten or twelve tables which covered the greater part of the ground space of Prof. Huxley's laboratory. The building was a comparatively new one, having been erected as an adjunct to the new South Kensington Museum on Exhibition Road, and from the top floor looked out the various rooms in which we were to receive our tutorage from the great naturalist. A climbing flight of stone steps, with landings, wound round to this summit, to which at times of irregular journey also conducted a box "lift." On one of my daily upward saunterings I chanced to stumble upon my master, who, always a rapid walker, overtook me on the grand "round," and cordially greeted me as a fellow-traveler. Possibly I allowed myself a little to be overtaken, for, though I had already been in the workshop and lecture theater a number of days, and had answered questions on Torula, Paramœcieum, and other low grades of organisms, and had even swallowed a good-natured rebuke for attempting to use a compound binocular in place of the simple, and confessedly clumsy, microscopes which were furnished gratuitously to the students, the opportunity to meet the man as man and not as teacher had not yet presented itself. Prof. Huxley's private rooms almost adjoined the laboratory, and frequently on passing the door the temptation grew strong upon me to knock and allow myself the honor of an interview, but each time a certain Tootsian timidity overcame me, and directed my course either to the right or to the left. The meeting on the landing was thus a deliverance, and Huxley allowed me to make the most of it by himself opening the conversation. It began with a reference to the deficiencies in modern building construction, particularly applied to the South Kensington annex, and evoked by the absence of proper mounting appliances. "Our lifts are not like the grand elevators in your country," remarked the professor—a thought in which it was not difficult to concur.

This first bit of extra-class conversation impressed itself forcibly upon my mind, both for the pleasure that it gave me and the