examining body. Clearly these scattered bodies needed organising; the educational forces of the metropolis were disintegrated; much teaching--and this was especially true of the medical schools--that could have been better done and better paid in a single institution, was split up among several, none of which, perhaps, could offer sufficient inducement to keep the best men permanently.

The most burning question was, whether these bodies should be united into a new university, with power to grant degrees of its own, or should combine with the existing University of London, so that the latter would become a teaching as well as an examining body. And if so, there was the additional question as to the form which this combination should take--whether federation, for example, or absorption.

The whole question had been referred to a Royal Commission by the Government of Lord Salisbury. The results were seen in the charter for a Gresham University, embodying the former alternative, and in the introduction into Parliament of a Bill to carry this scheme into effect. But this action had only been promoted by some of the bodies interested, and was strongly opposed by other bodies, as well as by many teachers who were interested in university reform.

Thus at the end of February, Huxley was invited, as a Governor of University College, to sign a protest against the provisions of the Charter for a Teaching University then before Parliament, especially in so far as it was proposed to establish a second examining body in London. The signatories also begged the Government to grant further inquiry before legislating on the subject

The protest, which received over 100 signatures of weight, contributed something towards the rejection of the Bill in the House of Commons. It became possible to hope that there might be established in London a University which should be something more than a mere collection of teachers, having as their only bond of union the preparation of students for a common examination. It was proposed to form an association to assist in the promotion of a teaching university for the metropolis; but the first draft of a scheme to reconcile the complication of interests and ideals involved led Huxley to express himself as follows:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 27, 1892.

Dear Professor Weldon [Then at University College, London; now Linacre Professor of Physiology at Oxford.],

I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for an answer to your letter of the 17th: but your proposal required a good deal of consideration, and I have had a variety of distractions.

So long as I am a member of the Senate of the University of London, I do not think I can with propriety join any Association which proposes to meddle with it. Moreover, though I have a good deal of sympathy with the ends of the Association, I have my doubts about many propositions set forth in your draft.

I took part in the discussions preliminary to Lord Justice Fry's scheme, and I was so convinced that that scheme would be wrecked amidst the complication of interests and ideals that claimed consideration, that I gave up attending to it. In fact, living so much out of the world now, and being sadly deaf, I am really unfit to intervene in business of this kind.

Worse still, I am conscious that my own ideal is, for the present at any rate, hopelessly impracticable. I should cut away medicine, law, and theology as technical specialities in charge of corporations which might be left to settle (in the case of medicine, in accordance with the State) the terms on which they grant degrees.

The university or universities should be learning and teaching bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, philosophy, and science, where any one who wanted to learn all that is known about these matters should find people who could teach him and put him in the way of learning for himself.

That is what the world will want one day or other, as a supplement to all manner of high schools and technical institution in which young people get decently educated and learn to earn their bread--such as our present universities.

It will be a place for men to get knowledge; and not for boys and adolescents to get degrees.

I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to see that this is the goal which they may reach, and in the meanwhile to take care that no such Philistine compromise as is possible at present, becomes too strong to survive a sharp shake.

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and especially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a letter to Professor Ray Lankester of April 11:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 11, 1892.

My dear Lankester,

We have been having ten days of sunshine, and I have been correspondingly lazy, especially about letter-writing. This, however, is my notion; that unless people clearly understand that the university of the future is to be a very different thing from the university of the past, they had better put off meddling for another generation.

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts.

The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.

The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence.

I think we should get pretty nearly what is wanted by grafting a College de France on to the University of London, subsidising University College and King's College (if it will get rid of its tests, not otherwise), and setting up two or three more such bodies in other parts of London. (Scotland, with a smaller population than London, has four complete universities!)

I should hand over the whole business of medical education and graduation to a medical universitas to be constituted by the royal colleges and medical schools, whose doings, of course, would be checked by the Medical Council.

Our side has been too apt to look upon medical schools as feeders for Science. They have been so, but to their detriment as medical schools. And now that so many opportunities for purely scientific training are afforded, there is no reason they should remain so.

The problem of the Medical University is to make an average man into a good practical doctor before he is twenty-two, and with not more expense than can be afforded by the class from which doctors are recruited, or than will be rewarded by the prospect of an income of 400 to 500 pounds a year.

It is not right to sacrifice such men, and the public on whom they practise, for the prospect of making 1 per cent of medical students into men of science.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[An undated draft in his own handwriting (probably the draft of a speech delivered the first time he came to the committee as President, October 26) expands the same idea as to the modern requirements of the University:--]

The cardinal fact in the University question, appears to me to be this: that the student to whose wants the mediaeval University was adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.

The mediaeval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers. Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by deduction from ancient data.

The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods of inquiry to the ascertainment of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train pioneers.

From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education, combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not primarily an institution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.

It is an institution in which a man who claims to devote himself to Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what is already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.

I include under Art,--Literature, the pictorial and plastic art with Architecture, and Music; and under Science,--Logic, Philosophy, Philology, Mathematics, and the Physical Sciences.

The question of the connection of the High Schools for general education, and of the technical schools of Theology, Law, Medicine, Engineering, Art, Music, and so on, with the University is a matter of practical detail. Probably the teaching of the subjects which stand in the relation of preliminaries to technical teaching and final studies in higher general education in the University would be utilised by the colleges and technical schools.

All that I have to say on this subject is, that I see no reason why the existing University of London should not be completed in the sense I have defined by grafting upon it a professoriate with the appropriate