An address on progress in Biology during the last hundred years has one element of simplicity; since, with scarcely a tinge of exaggeration, the whole subject from its inception may be held included. Though the materials studied by biologists are those which have been the objects of man's curiosity from the earliest times, yet the biological way of looking at them was new, and biology was a term deliberately selected to proclaim the consciousness of a new hope. Treviranus—Gottfried Reinhold, 1776–1837, of Bremen, elder brother of the well-known botanist Ludolf Christian (1779–1864)–was the first to use the word Biology (1802). He complained that the current treatments both of zoology and botany were lacking in penetration and in comprehensiveness, and that their practitioners were too often giving a divided attention, with an eye ever wandering towards medicine and other applications. The catalogues of plants and animals, and barren descriptions compiled in the name of those sciences, are a beginning, not an end. They are the materials which the science of living things is to absorb and co-ordinate. The problem before the biologist is, What is Life? and the collections have value in so far as they contribute to a solution of that problem.

My views on the relations between scientific and classical education were lately given in an Essay which appeared in the Cambridge Essays on Education, 1917. I regret I have no spare copies.

Education is often represented as a process by which boys originally homogeneous are converted into specialised types. I submit that all schemes of education should be planned in accordance with the physiological fact that living material is, as regards aptitudes, naturally heterogeneous. To provide adequately for those who have these various aptitudes—which may often be latent until puberty—the teaching should be as varied as possible, including elements of every kind of knowledge, to be presented in their most attractive forms, without pedantry, mysticism or prudery.

Classical teaching should, in my opinion, be maintained for all who can afford a complete education. I have continually supported compulsory classics at Cambridge, being convinced that without this requirement by the Universities they will cease to be a staple of education even in the Public Schools. Whittled as it was to nothing the Greek test became ridiculous and has now disappeared, with Latin soon to follow.

The classical teachers are themselves very greatly to blame for the contempt in which their subject is usually held by scientific and practical men. They have steadily refused to put grammar anywhere but first. It is possible to know a language enough for many purposes both of use and enjoyment with very slender equipment in grammar.

From time to time I am asked by students, botanical and other, Was Huxley a great man? Did he do very much? I have a clear answer. I say, if you were a zoologist you could not ask that question, for you would know that Huxley worked over almost the whole face of zoology, and that so much of modern classification and terminology is the product of his logic and “organised common-sense” that if we turn to any text-book earlier than about 1850, when Huxley's operations were beginning, we feel ourselves in zoological pre-history. It is all very well to say that anybody who chose to look could see that starfishes, Holothurians and Medusae should not be classed together and with various other creatures, but neither Lamarck nor Guvier did notice that Radiata and Polyps were preposterous medleys. Most of the great groups at one time or another came under Huxley's attention, and his instinct for order and his morphological sagacity were so sure that his judgment has been generally accepted by his successors.

I am aware, however, that on the occasion of this centenary the services we are to commemorate are not those which he rendered as a great architect of academic morphology. To the world, scientific as well as lay, Huxley is chiefly famous as the champion of evolutionary doctrine, whose vigorous and skilful advocacy counted for so much in obtaining the favourable verdict of the public. The opportunity was prodigious. He had a splendid case.

The recognition of Evolution as the mode by which the human race came into existence has reacted in various ways on conceptions of education. In recent years, the study of the nature of variation and heredity (known as Genetics), the phenomena by which we must suppose Evolution to proceed, has made rapid progress. The knowledge thus acquired limits in several ways our expectations as to the results which education can attain. That education can modify the composition and development of such a people as our own is not in doubt; but even the preliminary acquaintance with what may be called racial physiology (recently acquired) has greatly promoted an understanding both of the possibilities of modification and of the way in which these changes are actually effected by the institution of public education. The conclusions to which genetic science points run counter to many notions long popularly entertained. It was, for example, assumed both by physiologists and by laymen that the effects of cultivation or training in the case of both animals and plants were, in greater or less degree, transmitted to the offspring, and that in the course of generations these effects would accumulate. This theory was prominently developed by Lamarck, and was adopted, with few exceptions (e.g. Sir W. Lawrence), by all writers on these subjects, notably by Charles Darwin. Weismann was the first to induce the world seriously to examine the foundations of this doctrine.