Notes

Abstract

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S presidential address is not his only outcome at Liverpool which it is our duty to chronicle—a duty which we perform with gratitude to him for his plain speaking. At the unveiling of Mr. Gladstone's statue on the I4^th inst., Mr. Huxley, after referring to the Compulsory Education measure, which promises in time to rid us of our worse than Eastern degradation, as one of Mr. Gladstone's greatest achievements, added that if he might presume to give advice to a man so eminent as Mr. Gladstone—if he might ask him to raise to a still higher point the lustre which would hereafter surround his name in the annals of the country, it was that he should recollect there was more than one sort of learning, and that the one sort which was more particularly competent to cause the development of the great interests of the country, was that learning which we were in the habit of calling Science. That Mr. Gladstone was profoundly acquainted with literature, that he was an acute and elegant scholar, they all knew, but he suspected that the full importance for the practical interests of the country of developing what was known as Science was not quite so clear to the Prime Minister as it might be But, seeing the great faculty of development which his past career had shown, he had no doubt that such a man would by-and-by see that if this great country was to become what it should be, he must not only put the means of education within the reach of every person in the land, but must take care that the education was of such a nature as to provide those persons with the knowledge which they could apply to their pursuits, and which would tend to make them understand best those laws under which the human family existed.