And my books—and watch-dog business generally?
How is that to be transacted whether as in-patient or out-patient at
Firdale? Much hospitality hath made thee mad.
Seriously, it's not to be done nohow. What between papers that don't come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep you waiting for months and then send the wrong things—and a general tendency of everybody to do nothing right or something wrong—it is as much as the two of us will do—to get in, and all in the course of the next three weeks.
Of course my wife has no business to go to London to superintend the packing—but I should like to see anybody stop her. However, she has got the faithful Minnie to do the actual work; and swears by all her Gods and Goddesses she will only direct.
It would only make her unhappy if I did not make pretend to believe, and hope no harm may come of it.
Tout a vous,
T.H. Huxley.
[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:—]