1890 MEDICAL EDUCATION 279 



Seriously, it's not to be done nohow. What between papers 

 that don't come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep 

 you waiting for months and then send the wrong things — and 

 a general tendency of everybody to do nothing right or some- 

 thing wrong — it is as much as the two of us will do — to get in, 

 and all in the course of the next three weeks. 



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

 intend the packing — but I should like to see anybody 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 will only make her unhappy if I did not make pretend to 

 believe, and hope no harm may come of it. — Tout a voits, 



T. H. Huxley. 



Another discussion which sprang up in the Times, upon 

 Medical Education, evoked a letter from him (Times, Au- 

 gust 7), urging that the preliminary training 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 educa- 

 tion, they would have come provided. 



He urged, too, that they should have received a proper 

 literary education instead of a sham acquaintance with 

 Latin, and insisted, as he had so often done, on the literary 

 wealth of their own language. 



Every one has his own ideas of what a liberal education 

 ought to include, and a correspondent wrote to ask him, 

 among other things, whether he did not think the higher 

 mathematics ought to be included. He replied : — 



Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, Aug. 16, 1890. 



I think mathematical training highly desirable, but advanced 

 mathematics, I am afraid, would be too great a burden in pro- 

 portion to its utility, to the ordinary student. 



I fully agree with you that the incapacity of teachers is the 

 weak point in the London schools. But what is to be expected 



