10 Southcliff Terrace, Eastbourne, December 6, 1888.

I think it would be a very good thing both for you and for Oxford if you went there.  Oxford science certainly wants stirring up, and notwithstanding your increase in years and wisdom, I think you would bear just a little more stirring down, so that the conditions for a transfer of energy are excellent!

Seriously, I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.  Science might say to you as the Staffordshire collier’s wife said to her husband at the fair, “Get thee foighten done and come whoam.”  You have a fair expectation of ripe vigour for twenty years; just think what may be done with that capital.

No use to tu quoque me.  Under the circumstances of the time, warfare has been my business and duty.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Two more letters of the year refer to the South Kensington examinations, for which Huxley was still nominally responsible.  As before, we see him reluctant to sign the report upon papers which he had not himself examined; yet at the same time doing all that lay in his power to assist by criticising the questions and thinking out the scheme of teaching on which the examination was to be based.  He replies to some proposed changes in a letter to Sir M. Foster of December 12:—­]

I am very sorry I cannot agree with your clients about the examination.  They should recollect the late Master of Trinity’s aphorism that even the youngest of us is not infallible.

I know exactly upon what principles I am going, and so far as I am at present informed that advantage is peculiar to my side.  Two points I am quite clear about—­one is the exclusion of Amphioxus, and the other the retention of so much of the Bird as will necessitate a knowledge of Sauropsidan skeletal characters and the elements of skeletal homologies in skull and limbs.

I have taken a good deal of pains over drawing up a new syllabus—­including dogfish—­and making room for it by excluding Amphioxus and all of bird except skeleton.  I have added Lamprey (cranial and spinal skeleton, not face cartilages), so that the intelligent student may know what a notochord means before he goes to embryology.  I have excluded Distoma and kept Helix.

The Committee must now settle the matter.  I have done with it.

[On December 27 he writes:—­]

I have been thinking over the Examinership business without coming to any very satisfactory result.  The present state of things is not satisfactory so far as I am concerned.  I do not like to appear to be doing what I am not doing.

—­ would of course be the successor indicated, if he had not so carefully cut his own throat as an Examiner...He would be bringing an action against the Lord President before he had been three years in office!...As I told Forster, when he was Vice-President, the whole value of the Examiner system depends on the way the examiners do their work.  I have the gravest doubt about —­ steadily plodding through the disgustful weariness of it as you and I have done, or observing any regulation that did not suit his fancy.