Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/360

328 side that Mrs. Thomas Collier, née Huxley, who had well earned her several premiums from the fine-art institutions of London, inherited her tendencies and capabilities in the direction of painting. Inspired in a measure, probably, through his love for art, and with an inborn feeling for mechanical constructions. Prof. Huxley always held a kindly sympathy for all that pertained to the science of engineering; and he frequently expressed the thought, which will doubtless seem strange to many, that he had missed his vocation, and that the true field of his activities should have been the field of an engineer. Yet it is singular that with this proclivity for a branch of study which requires for its successful accomplishment a generous supply of mathematical stimulus, the fact that he was in no way a mathematician did not terrify Huxley. He frequently admitted that he had neither a liking nor an aptitude for figures, and it was a timely forethought in lecturing, when a condition required a mathematical calculation for its elucidation, to have the answer written in advance at one corner of the board. This, as was naively explained by the lecturer, was to avoid the easy possibility of an error creeping into an offhand calculation or problem in sums.

In lecturing to his classes Huxley adhered strictly to business, and it was rarely that a matter of levity was introduced to give merriment to his listeners, I recall, in a course of some seventy lectures, only a single instance of this kind, when, for some reason (no longer in my memory), a reference was made to Chamisso's Peter Schlemiel—a book which Prof. Huxley frankly admitted gave him more genuine pleasure than any other in nonscientific literature. Whether it was the refreshing frankness of this admission, or the fact in itself that was quoted, which on this occasion brought forth an unbounded merriment from his students, was perhaps not fully decided for all of us, but there was no questioning the spontaneousness of the applause which followed the utterance. And this, as I now recall it, was the only instance of applause greeting the lecturer in the middle of the lecture during the entire course of my studentship. Huxley, like Tyndall, was always careful to have his lectures fully prepared. A few notes jotted down on a fly-sheet of paper or in small notebooks were the only guide for the full hour, which to most of the students passed very rapidly. There was no display of eloquence, no attempt to clothe description or explanation in floral verse, but everything was stated in terse and succinct language, although with due emphasis on important points, and this it was that made it easy to follow. These class lectures were naturally very different from public addresses, in which Huxley always maintained that wonderful dignity of expression and choice rhetoric which have been the despair of his combatants, scientific no less than