164 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. VII 



facturers who keep you waiting for months and then send 

 the wrong things — and a general tendency of everybody 

 to do nothing right or something wrong — it is as much 

 as the two of us will do — to get in, and aU in the course 

 of the next three weeks. 



Of course my wife has no business to go to London to 

 superintend the packing — but I should like to see any- 

 body stop her. However, she has got the faithful Minnie 

 to do the actual work ; and swears by all her Gods and 

 Goddesses she will only direct. 



It would only make her unhappy if I did not make 

 pretend to believe, and hope no harm may come of it. — 

 Tout a vous, T. H. Huxley. 



Another discussion which sprang up in the Times, 

 upon Medical Education, evoked a letter from him 

 (Times, August 7), urging that the preliminary train- 

 ing ought to be much more thorough and exact. The 

 student at his first coming is so completely habituated 

 to learn only from books or oral teaching, that the 

 attempt to learn from things and to get his knowledge 

 at first hand is something new and strange. Thus a 

 large proportion of medical students spend much of 

 their first year in learning how to learn, and when 

 they have done that, in acquiring the preliminary 

 scientific knowledge, with which, under any rational 

 system of education, they would have come provided. 



He urged, too, that they should have received a 

 proper literary education instead of a sham acquaint- 

 ance with Latin, and insisted, as he had so often 

 done, on the literary w^ealth of their own language. 



Every one has his own ideas of what a liberal 



