Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/355

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HUXLEY'S LIFE AND WORK.
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more complicated than Huxley supposed. The Mongoloid races extend now from China to Lapland; but in Huxley's opinion they never penetrated much further west, and never reached our islands. "I am unable," he says, "to discover any ground for believing that a Lapp element has ever entered into the population of these islands." It is true that we have not, so far as I know, anything which amounts to proof. We know, however, that all the other animals which are associated with the Lapps once inhabited Great Britain. Was man the only exception? I think not, more especially when we find, not only the animals of Lapland, but tools and weapons identical with those of the Lapps. I must not enlarge on this, and perhaps I may have an opportunity of laying my views on the subject more fully before the Society; but I may be allowed to indicate my own conclusion, namely, that the races to which Huxley refers are amongst the latest arrivals in our islands; that England was peopled long before its separation from the mainland, and that after the English Channel was formed, successive hordes of invaders made their way across the sea, but as they brought no women, or but few, with them, they exterminated the men, or reduced them to slavery, and married the women. Thus through their mothers our countrymen retain the strain of previous races, and hence, perhaps, we differ so much from the populations across the silver streak.

Summing up this side of Huxley's work, Sir M. Foster has truly said that "whatever bit of life he touched in his search, protozoan, polyp, mollusc, crustacean, fish, reptile, beast and man—and there were few living things he did not touch—he shed light on it, and left his mark. There is not one, or hardly one, of the many things which lie has written which may not be read again to-day with pleasure and with profit, and, not once or twice only in such a reading, it will be felt that the progress of science has given to words written long ago a. strength and meaning even greater than that which they seemed to have when first they were read."

In 1870 Huxley became a member of the first London School Board, and though his health compelled him to resign early in 1872, it would be difficult to exaggerate the value of the service he rendered to London and, indeed, to the country generally.

The education and discipline which he recommended were:

(1) Physical training and drill.
(2) Household work or domestic economy, especially for girls.
(3) The elementary laws of conduct.
(4) Intellectual training, reading, writing and arithmetic, elementary science, music and drawing.

He maintained that 'no boy or girl should leave school without possessing a grasp of the general character of science, and without having been disciplined more or less in the methods of all sciences.'