My dear Foster,
I send back the "Heathen Deutscheree's" (whose ways are dark) letter lest I forget it to-morrow.
Meanwhile perpend these two things:—
1. United Colleges propose to give just as good an examination and require as much qualification as the Scotch Universities. Why then give their degree a distinguishing mark?
2. "Academical distinctions" in medicine are all humbug. You are making a medical technical school at Cambridge—and quite right too. The United Colleges, if they do their business properly, will confer just as much, or as little "academical distinction" as Cambridge by their degree.
3. The Fellowship of the College of Surgeons is in every sense as much an "academical distinction" as the Masterships in Surgery or Doctorate of Medicine of the Scotch and English Universities.
4. You may as well cry for the moon as ask my colleagues in the Senate to meddle seriously with the Matriculation. They are possessed by the devil that cries continually, "There is only the Liberal education, and Greek and Latin are his prophets."
[At Bournemouth he also applied himself to writing the Darwin obituary notice for the Royal Society, a labour of love which he had long felt unequal to undertaking. The manuscript was finally sent off to the printer's on April 6, unlike the still longer unfinished memoir on Spirula, to which allusion is made here, among other business of the "Challenger" Committee, of which he was a member.
On February 12 he writes to Sir J. Evans:—]
Spirula is a horrid burden on my conscience—but nobody could make head or tail of the business but myself.