and to the existing anthropoids.  It has already been pointed out that the gradual extinction of lower races of man is widening the apparent gap between existing man and existing apes; and evidence accumulates that many still more primitive and more ape-like races of man than the lowest existing savages have disappeared from the surface of the earth.  Moreover, we know that existing anthropoids are the degenerate and scattered remnants of what was once a much more widely spread and more important group.  We have some reason for believing the contrary, and no reason for believing that the surviving anthropoids represent the most man-like apes that have lived.

The second great point in which a modern writer would amend Huxley’s statement of the case is more purely anatomical.  One result of Darwin’s work has been that anatomists attend much more closely to the slight variations of anatomical structure to be found among individuals of the same species.  A comparison between an individual human body and the body of an individual gorilla is not now considered sufficient.  The comparison must be made between the results of dissection of a very large number of men and of a very large number of gorillas.  The anatomy of a type is not the anatomy of an individual; it is a kind of central point around which there oscillate the variations presented by the individuals belonging to the type.  So far as this newer method has been applied, it has been found that the variations of the gorilla type frequently, in the case of individual organs, overlap the variations of the human type, and that the structure of man differs from the structure of any anthropoid type only in that the abstract central point of its variations is slightly different from the abstract central point of the variations presented by individual orangs, gorillas, and chimpanzees.

CHAPTER X

SCIENCE AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION

     Science-Teaching Fifty Years Ago—­Huxley’s Insistence on
     Reform—­Science Primers—­Physiography—­Elementary
     Physiology—­The Crayfish—­Manuals of Anatomy—­Modern
     Microscopical Methods—­Practical Work in Biological
     Teaching—­Invention of the Type System—­Science in Medical
     Education—­Science and Culture.

Less than half a century ago, there was practically no generally diffused knowledge of even the elements of science and practically no provision for teaching it.  Medical students, in the course of their professional education, received some small instruction in botany, chemistry, and physiology; in the greater universities of England and the Continent there were not in all a dozen professorships of science apart from special branches of medicine; in the Scottish universities there were one or two dreamy chairs of “Natural and Civil History,” the occupiers of which were supposed to dispense instruction in half a dozen sciences.  There was no scientific teaching at the public schools; there were practically no books available for beginners in science, and even the idea of guides to laboratory work had not been invented.  Huxley, addressing in 1854 a particularly select audience in St. Martin’s Hall, London, spoke to them of the