lly. Later on,
Huxley described it as follows:

"I lecture to a class of students daily for about four months and
a half, and my class have, of course, their text-books; but the
essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I regard as
really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for
practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances
needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged
in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instruments, and
we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and
animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the
yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and
some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an
Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a
starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water
mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle.
We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a
pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we
have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled
dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite
conception, by means of sense images, of the characteristic
structure of each of the leading modifications of the animal
kingdom; and that is perfectly possible by going no further than
the length of that list of forms which I have enumerated. If a
man knows the structure of the animals I have mentioned, he has a
clear and exact, however limited apprehension of the essential
features of the organization of all those great divisions of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned
severally belong. And it then becomes possible to him to read
with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a
structure, he has a definite image in his mind of what the name
means in the particular creature he is reading about, and
therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere
repetition of words; but every term employed in the description,
we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image
of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a
distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a
modification of that which he has seen."

H