From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses—­a method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle.  The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand.  The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations.  Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order, it had the disadvantages of requiring the beginner to have much skill in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known organism to the better known.  Starting with the latter, the beginner would know better what to look for.  His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker, argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers preferred to keep to his original arrangement.

Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts—­all in the sixteen years between 1866 and 1882.  At the London University, also, he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate, and then as president of a reforming Association.  It is noteworthy, too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College, and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a general subject.

In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the education of women.  As early as 1860 he wrote:  “I don’t see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions.”  If only people would not bring up their daughters as man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; “though,” he added, “I don’t think that men have anything to fear from their competition.”  On this point he remarked five years later:  “Nature’s old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for boys justifies its application to girls as well.”

A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education of women:—­