[Another discussion which sprang up in the “Times”, upon Medical Education, evoked a letter from him ("Times” August 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 education, 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, August 16, 1890.

I think mathematical training highly desirable, but advanced mathematics, I am afraid, would be too great a burden in proportion 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 when a man accepts a lectureship in a medical school simply as a grappling-iron by which he may hold on until he gets a hospital appointment?

Medical education in London will never be what it ought to be, until the “Institutes of Medicine,” as the Scotch call them, are taught in only two or three well-found institutions—­while the hospital schools are confined to the teaching of practical medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and so on.

[The following letters illustrate Huxley’s keenness to correct any misrepresentation of his opinions from a weighty source, amid the way in which, without abating his just claims, he could make the peace gracefully.

In October Dr. Abbott delivered an address on “Illusions,” in which, without, of course, mentioning names, he drew an unmistakable picture of Huxley as a thorough pessimist.  A very brief report appeared in the “Times” of October 9, together with a leading article upon the subject.  Huxley thereupon wrote to the “Times” a letter which throws light both upon his early days and his later opinions:—­]

The article on “Illusions” in the “Times” of to-day induces me to notice the remarkable exemplification of them to which you have drawn public attention.  The Reverend Dr. Abbott has pointed the moral of his discourse by a reference to a living man, the delicacy of which will be widely and justly appreciated.  I have reason to believe that I am acquainted with this person, somewhat intimately, though I can by no means call myself his best friend—­far from it.