again
upon the popular nature of the classes; their great advantage was that
they were accessible to all who chose to avail themselves of them
after working hours, and that they brought the means of instruction to
the doors of the factories and workshops. The subjects which he
considered of most importance were foreign languages, drawing, and
elementary sciences, and he wished them to be used first of all by
those who were handicraftsmen and who therefore left the elementary
schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

In a lecture given at the formal opening of the Johns Hopkins
University at Baltimore in 1876, and in a Rectorial address to the
University of Aberdeen two years earlier, Huxley laid down the general
lines of university education as he conceived it. He began by
supposing that a good primary education had already been received.

"Such an education should enable an average boy of fifteen or
sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and
accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from
the study of our classic writers; to have a general acquaintance
with the history of his own country and with the great laws of
social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical
and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary
arithmetic and geometry. He should have obtained an acquaintance
with logic rather by example than by precept; while the
acquirement of the elements of music and drawing should have been
a pleasure rather than work."

He had not much to say for secondary or intermediate education, partly
because at that time, in England at least, the secondary schools were
in a hopeless state of incapacity, and differed from primary schools
not only in their greater expense, their adaptation to the
class-spirit which demanded the separation of the boys of the upper
and middle classes from those in the lower ranks of society, but
chiefly in the futility of the education given at the majority of
them. But where intermediate schools did exist, he demanded that they
should keep on the same wide track of general knowledge, not
sacrificing one branch of knowledge for another. He held that the
elementary instruction to which he had referred embraced all the real
kinds of knowledge and mental activity possible to man. The university
could add no new fields of mental activity, no new departments of
knowledge. What it co