g the beginner to have much skill
in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known
organism to the better known. Starting with the latter, the beginner
would know better what to look for. His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker,
argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him
to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers
preferred to keep to his original arrangement.

Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active
work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for
Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific
Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire
into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts--all in the
sixteen years between 1866 and 1882. At the London University, also,
he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove
hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate,
and then as president of a reforming Association. It is noteworthy,
too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College,
and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he
did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a
general subject.

In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the
education of women. As early as 1860 he wrote: "I don't see how we are
to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is
sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese
superstitions." If only people would not bring up their daughters as
man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see
women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; "though,"
he added, "I don't think that men have anything to fear from their
competition." On this point he remarked five years later: "Nature's
old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will
be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for
boys justifies its application to girls as well."

A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as
doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education
of women:--

Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the
average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally,
as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are
much better endowed in all these respects than m