[A new Commission was promised to look into the whole question of the London University.  This is referred to in a letter to Sir J. Donnelly of March 30, 1892.]

Unless you want to kill Foster, don’t suggest him for the Commission.  He is on one already.

The whole affair is a perfect muddle of competing crude projects and vested interests, and is likely to end in a worse muddle, as anything but a patch up is, I believe, outside practical politics at present.

If I had carte blanche, I should cut away the technical “Faculties” of Medicine, Law, and Theology, and set up first-class chairs in Literature, Art, Philosophy, and pure Science—­a sort of combination of Sorbonne (without Theology) and College de France.

Thank Heaven I have never been asked to say anything, and my chimaeras remain in petto.  They would be scouted.

[On the other hand, he was most anxious to keep the School of Science at South Kensington entirely independent.  He writes again on May 26:—­]

I trust Rucker and Thorpe are convinced by this time that I knew what I was talking about when I told them, months ago, that there would be an effort to hook us into the new University hotch-potch.

I am ready to oppose any such project tooth and nail.  I have not been striving these thirty years to get Science clear of their schoolmastering sham-literary peddling to give up the game without a fight.  I hope my Lords will be staunch.

I am glad my opinion is already on record.

[And similarly to Sir M. Foster on October 30:—­]

You will have to come to London and set up physiology at the Royal College of Science.  It is the only place in Great Britain in which scientific teaching is trammelled neither by parsons nor by litterateurs.  I have always implored Donnelly to keep us clear of any connection with a University of any kind, sort, or description, and I tried to instil the same lesson into the doctors the other day.  But the “liberal education” cant is an obsession of too many of them.

[A further step was taken in June, when he was sent a new draft of proposals, afterwards adopted by the above-mentioned general meeting of the Association in March 1893, sketching a constitution for a new university, and asking for the appointment of a Statutory Commission to carry it out.  The University thus constituted was to be governed by a Court, half of which should consist of university professors] ("As for a government by professors only” [he writes in the “Times” of December 6, 1892], “the fact of their being specialists is against them.  Most of them are broad-minded; practical men; some are good administrators.  But, unfortunately, there is among them, as in other professions, a fair sprinkling of one-idea’d fanatics, ignorant of the commonest conventions of official relation, and content with nothing if they cannot get everything their own way.  It is these persons who, with the