Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TECHNICAL EDUCATION. (1877.) Professor Huxley has seized the occasion offered him by his promise to aid the Working Men's Club and Institute Union by contributing to their present series of fortnightly lectures, to state his opinion on a question which has lately been exercising the minds of some of the most influential members of various city companies. For some time past a joint committee, representing the most important among these bodies, has been endeavouring to obtain information as to the best means of applying certain of their surplus funds to the assistance of what is called technical education, and there is little doubt that a proposal for a huge technical university, made some time ago, and the discussion which took place in connection with that proposal, has had somewhat to do in leading to the present condition of affairs. Professor Huxley and some four or five other gentlemen have been appealed to by this joint committee to send in reports on what they consider the best way to set about the work, and it is from this point of view that Professor Huxley's lecture is so important. It was not merely fresh and brilliant and full of good things, as all his lectures are, but is doubtless an embodiment of his report to the joint committee. We are rejoiced, therefore, to see that Professor Huxley is at one with the view that, after all, the mind is the most important instrument which the handicraftsman, whether he be a tinker or a physicist, will ever be called upon to use, and that a technical education which teaches him to use a lathe, a tool or a loom, before he has learned how t6 use his mind, is no education at all. Professor Huxley not only defined technical education as the best training to qualify the pupil for learning technicalities for himself, bu...