columns of the daily press, in each of which the "undernurse of Darwinism" came in for an uncommonly large share of ridicule. Finding that none of these papers brought forth any comment from Prof. Huxley, their author in a personal letter called his attention to them, at the same time asking to be advised as to what particular course of reading would most readily enable him to grapple with the various scientific questions which at that time agitated the world. Prof. Huxley's full and laconic answer was, "Take a cockroach and dissect it." No further inquiry came from that source.
I once found Prof. Huxley much depressed over a small paragraph which also touched, and in a very depreciatory manner, the evolutionary hypothesis, which had been contributed to the daily press by his friend Carlyle. He greatly deplored the recklessness of the utterances contained in the squib, and especially painful to him was a markedly undignified reference to the one man for whom Huxley had a greater reverence than for any other—Charles Darwin. To my interrogatory as to whether he considered it necessary to reply to the paragraph, he promptly and emphatically answered, "No!"
Remorseless as Huxley occasionally was in the cold exposition of the blunders of his colaborers in science, he was usually very lenient to those who pointed out his own mistakes. I remember one occasion when a post-graduate student of the Royal School of Mines, Patrick (now Professor) Geddes, intimated to the professor that his interpretation of the mechanism of the radula in the common garden snail, as was set forth in the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals, was not supported by the newer laboratory dissections. Prof. Huxley's response was a request of Mr. Geddes to try a new dissection; it was done, and it was found that the pupil was right and the master wrong. Only once do I recall when a correction was received with a regret almost akin to displeasure—the case of the Bathybius, the all-pervading protoplasm of the oceanic deep. When Sir Wyville Thomson separated this substance as a mineral precipitate, it smashed a thought that had already become pregnant with English and German naturalists, and which threatened to become of genuine usefulness in explaining the origin and development of the organic life forms of the earth.
Among his many eminent scientific contemporaries there were few for whom Huxley had greater admiration than the German morphologist, Gegenbaur, and Karl Vogt; the latter he regarded as a tower of strength and in a certain sense a genius. When, nearly two years after leaving London, I returned to my alma mater and informed my past master that I had in the meantime been enrolled as a student, although in the class of paleon-
