Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/359

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
A STUDENT'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HUXLEY.
327

surprise it occasioned in the knowledge that I was from American soil. No reference to foreign studentship had heretofore been made, and I was a little puzzled to know what kind of information had led to the betrayal of my personality. Considerably later I learned that a close friend of my father's, the late Prof. Youmans—himself a friend equally to science and to the scientific student—had addressed a personal note to Prof. Huxley, advising him of my presence and commending me in the usual way to a kind consideration and to an equally considerate esteem. It was characteristic of the justness and fairness of the master that this letter, while it may have paved the way to a more informal acquaintance outside of the class room, in no way influenced favoritism within, or saved me from sound criticism of my work when it merited it. This was not exactly at long intervals, and particularly do I recall the painful awaiting of judgment on a mangled dissection of the nerves of the frog. "Your blue papers are where the red should be, and the sympathetic is gone"—a piece of information, the basis of a portion of which had already only too keenly been realized.

At no time was criticism given in' a way to hurt, and more commonly encouragement and commendation took the place of criticism. But a thing had to be really well done to call out praise, and an exuberance of it rarely broke an echo from the laboratory walls. On one occasion I was startled by the inquiry if my drawing—a drawing of the division lines in the cells of a certain water plant—was made from the object or from imagination, an inquiry which threw doubt in my mind as to whether I was receiving praise or condemnation. The representation was considered unusually true to Nature, but I was forced to admit that it was a combined product of the visual and mental eye, and not a mere transcript of Nature. This explanation was in no way a satisfaction to Prof. Huxley, who took the opportunity to admonish the class that drawings, however true they may appear to Nature, are only true when they strictly copy the objects which they are intended to portray.

Huxley himself was an excellent draughtsman, and it was frequently remarked of him, as it was also of our own Dr. Leidy, that had he devoted himself to painting, instead of to science, he would have forced himself to a position not less prominent as an artist than that which he occupied as a naturalist. He was always precise in his drawings on the blackboard, and if he could not, perhaps, like Prof. Weisbach, of Freiberg, jump to a circle and punch its middle point with a stub of chalk, he could, apparently without any hesitancy, draw the most complex anatomical constructions, and in such a way as to make every point clearly intelligible to the student. It was probably from the father's