Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/362

330 for health recuperation, had he abstained from public deliverances.

It has been frequently assumed that Huxley cared for little beyond science, and especially for that side of it which was combative either with the Church or with the State, but nothing could be further from the truth than the belief that this was in fact the case. It is perfectly true that Huxley used all the vigor of speech of which he was capable to emphasize what he considered to be the proper position of science in any education, and perhaps he even considered the acquisition of scientific knowledge to be of more importance than any other form of learning, but he was always careful to emphasize that education was only such when it was broad and comprehensive, when it comprised not only science, but in addition a goodly share of the world's history and literature. His own resource in the fields of literature (English, French, German, and Italian) and history was prodigious, and he rarely was at a loss to instantly take advantage of a citation from some early scholar to demolish at first or second hand an adversary at arms. When I was in London he was reading, with the assistance of a friend, Russian, and mainly for the purpose of fully familiarizing himself with the work of the great anatomist, A. Kovalewski, whose writings he was seemingly the first to bring to the critical notice of English-speaking naturalists. It was this thorough familiarity with what one is almost tempted to call universal knowledge that made Prof. Huxley such a dreaded foe to his enemies, and it has well been remarked, "Woe be to him who attempts to measure arms with such an antagonist!"

Huxley was a firm believer in thorough knowledge, and he took no stock in brain-stuffing; to have known a thing once, and to be able to put your hand upon it when you again want it, was his maxim. The opening address delivered by him before the Johns Hopkins University, in 1876, gives the keynote to his position in the matter of special training, "Know a thing directly," he often remarked, "and do not assume that you know more of it by knowing around it." He had no patience with those who spoke with a pseudo-authority begotten of chance, and was bitter in his denunciation of officialism as affording a pretext for either defending or attacking scientific dogma. An interesting anecdote, which Prof. Huxley himself related to me, shows the occasional happy frame of mind in which our savant found himself when he, in turn, was receiving blows. A prominent bishop of the English Church, whose name it is not here necessary to mention, had been for some time endeavoring to smash the Darwinian hypothesis through some actual researches in zoölogy which he claimed to have undertaken. Toward the accomplishment of this laudable effort he used many pages of the current magazines and equally many