student lasted only four years, a space of time barely sufficient for the necessary minimum of purely medical and surgical work.  Huxley’s view was that chemistry and physics, botany and zooelogy, should be part of the general education, not of the special medical education; he wished students to spend one or two years after their ordinary career at school in work on these elementary scientific subjects, and then to begin their medical course free from the burden of extra-professional subjects.  With certain limits due to the different local conditions in different teaching centres Huxley’s system is being adopted.  In most cases the authorities in medical education are unable to leave the whole responsibility of the elementary education in science to the schools from which medical students come, as the conditions under which scientific subjects are still taught in schools leave much to be desired.  The average length of the medical curriculum has been extended and the elementary scientific subjects are taken first, sometimes at the medical colleges, sometimes in the scientific departments of universities.  The interesting general point of view is that Huxley, although himself a biologist and teacher of biology, took too broad an outlook on the general policy of education to insist upon his own subject to the detriment of the precise practical objects of the training of medical students.

In the days of Huxley’s greatest activity, while by the natural force of events and by his special efforts science was becoming more and more recognised as a necessary and important branch of general education, the cry was raised against it that scientific education was not capable of giving what is called culture.  A scientific man was regarded as a mere scientific specialist, and science was considered to have no place in, and in fact to be an enemy of, “liberal education.”  In 1880, at Birmingham, Huxley attacked this view in a speech delivered at the opening of the Mason College.  Sir Josiah Mason, the benevolent founder of that great institution, had made it one of the conditions of the foundation that the College should make no provision for “mere literary instruction and education.”  This gave Huxley a text for raising the whole question of the relation of science to culture.  He declared that he held very strongly by two convictions.

“The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time on either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.”

He quoted from Matthew Arnold, then in the zenith of his fame as a chief apostle of culture, and shewed that there were two propositions involved in the “literary” view of culture.  The first was that a “criticism