considerable want, no doubt; but it must be recollected that it is much better to want a teacher than to want the desire to learn.

Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must call Physical Geography. What I mean is that which the Germans call Erdkunde. It is a description of the earth, of its place and relation to other bodies; of its general structure, and of its great features—winds, tides, mountains, plains: of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal worlds, of the varieties of man. It is the peg upon which the greatest quantity of useful and entertaining scientific information can be suspended.

Literature is not upon the College program; but I hope some day to see it there. For literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure, and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable us to enjoy that pleasure. There is scope enough for the purposes of liberal education in the study of the rich treasures of our own language alone. All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of a refined taste by attention to sound criticism. But there is no reason why French and German should not be mastered sufficiently to read what is worth reading in those languages with pleasure and with profit.

And finally, by and by, we must have History; treated not as a succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series of biographies; not as evidence that Providence has always been on the side of either Whigs or Tories; but as the development of man in times past, and in other conditions than our own.

But, as it is one of the principles of our College to be

self-supporting, the public must lead, and we must follow, in these matters. If my hearers take to heart what I have said about liberal education, they will desire these things, and I doubt not we shall be able to supply them. But we must wait till the demand is made.

4

[THIS address was delivered in Birmingham in 1880 at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's Science College, one of the earliest technical schools to be established in England. Apparently its founder intended it to be merely a vocational school to fit men for service in the factories of Birmingham. But Huxley, with a tact equal to his courtesy, made a plea for a more liberal training and for the inclusion of broadening studies, the necessity for which the benevolent founder had failed to see. A man of science himself, Huxley was also a man of letters, with a keen appreciation of literature, an abiding affection for it, and a firm conviction of its utility in opening the mind of the immature. He had no more sympathy with those who held that an acquaintance with science was all-sufficient than he had with those who held that a knowledge of literature was all-sufficient. And this address may therefore be regarded as a postscript to that on "A Liberal Education" which he had delivered twelve years earlier.]

VIII

SCIENCE AND CULTURE

[1880]

Six years ago, as some of my present hearers may remember, I had the privilege of addressing a large assemblage of the inhabitants of this city, who had gathered together to do honor to the memory of their famous townsman, Joseph Priestley; and, if any satisfaction attaches to posthumous glory, we may hope that the names of the burnt-out philosopher were then finally appeased.

No man, however, who is endowed with a fair share of common sense, and not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary or posthumous fame with the highest good; and Priestley's life leaves no doubt that he, at any rate, set a much higher value upon the advancement of knowledge, and the promotion of that freedom of thought which is at once the cause and the -consequence of intellectual progress.

Hence I am disposed to think that, if Priestley could be among us to-day, the occasion of our meeting would afford him even greater pleasure than the proceedings which celebrated the centenary of his chief discovery. The kindly heart would be moved, the high sense of social duty would be satisfied, by the spectacle of well-earned