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.
If I am right, I can affirm that this poor fellow did not escape from the "narrow school in which he was brought up" at nineteen, but more than two years later; and, as he pursued his studies in London, perhaps he had as many opportunities for "fruitful converse with friends and equals," to say nothing of superiors, as he would have enjoyed elsewhere.
Moreover, whether the naval officers with whom he consorted were book-learned or not, they were emphatically men, trained to face realities and to have a wholesome contempt for mere talkers. Any one of them was worth a wilderness of phrase-crammed undergraduates. Indeed, I have heard my misguided acquaintance declare that he regards his four years' training under the hard conditions and the sharp discipline of his cruise as an education of inestimable value.
As to being a "keen-witted pessimist out and out," the Reverend Dr. Abbott's "horrid example" has shown me the following sentence:—"Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism." He says he published it in 1888, in an article on "Industrial Development," to be seen in the "Nineteenth Century". But no doubt this is another illusion. No superior person, brought up "in the Universities," to boot, could possibly have invented a myth so circumstantial.