328 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xviii 



ing bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, philoso- 

 phy, and science, where any one who wanted to learn all that 

 is known about these matters should find people who could teach 

 him and put him in the way of learning for himself. 



That is what the world will want one day or other, as a 

 supplement to all manner of high schools and technical insti- 

 tutions in which young people get decently educated and learn 

 to earn their bread — such as our present universities. 



It will be a place for men to get knowledge; and not for 

 boys and adolescents to get degrees. 



I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to see that 

 this is the goal which they may reach, and in the meanwhile to 

 take care that no such Philistine compromise as is possible at 

 present, becomes too strong to survive a sharp shake. — I am, 

 yours very faithfully, T. H. Huxley. 



He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and espe- 

 cially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a letter to 

 Professor Ray Lankester of April 1 1 : — 



Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April n, 1892. 



My dear Lankester — We have been having ten days of 

 sunshine, and I have been correspondingly lazy, especially about 

 letter-writing. This, however, is my notion; that unless people 

 clearly understand that the university of the future is to be a 

 very different thing from the university of the past, they had 

 better put off meddling for another generation. 



The mediaeval university looked backwards : it professed to 

 be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of 

 dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with 

 novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, 

 of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral 

 teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and 

 rarity of manuscripts. 



The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of 

 new knowledge : its professors have to be at the top of the wave 

 of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their 

 nostrils ; laboratory work the main business of the scientific 

 student ; books his main helpers. 



The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still 

 have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and 

 principles their proper relative prominence. 



I think we should get pretty nearly what is wanted by graft- 



