I don’t mind fighting to the death in a good big row, but when A and B are supplying themselves from C’s orchard, I don’t think it is very much worth while to dispute whether B filled his pockets directly from the trees or indirectly helped himself to the contents of A’s basket.  If B has so helped himself, he certainly ought to say so like a man, but if I were A, I would not much care whether he did or not.

—­ has been horribly disgusted about it, but I am not sure the discipline may not have opened his eyes to new and useful aspects of nature.

[The summer of 1865 saw the inception of an educational experiment—­an International Education Society—­to which Huxley gladly gave his support as a step in the right direction.  He had long been convinced of the inadequacy of existing forms of education—­survivals from the needs of a bygone age—­to prepare for the new forms into which intellectual life was passing.  That educators should be content to bring up the young generation in the modes of thought which satisfied their forefathers three centuries ago, as if no change had passed over the world since then, filled him with mingled amazement and horror.

The outcome of the scheme was the International College, at Spring Grove, Isleworth, under the headmastership of Dr. Leonhard Schmitz; one of the chief members of the committee being Dr. (afterwards Sir) William Smith, while at the head of the Society was Richard Cobden, under whose presidency it had been registered some time before.  John Stuart Mill, however, refused to join, considering that this was not the most needed reform in education, and that he could not support a school in which the ordinary theology was taught.

An article in the “Reader” for June 17, 1865, sketches the plan.  The design was to give a liberal education to boys whether intended for a profession or for commerce.  The education for both was the same up to a certain point, corresponding to that given in our higher schools, together with foreign languages and the elements of physical and social science, after which the courses bifurcated. (For a fuller account of the scientific education see below.) Special stress was laid on modern languages, both for themselves and as a preparation and help for classical teaching.  Accordingly, the International College was one of three parallel institutions in England, France, and Germany, where a boy could in turn acquire a sound knowledge of all three languages while continuing the same course of education.  The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, however, proved fatal to the scheme.

Some letters to his friend Dr. W.K.  Parker, show the good-fellowship which existed between them, as well as the interest he took in the style and success of Parker’s work. (A man of whom he wrote (preface to Professor Jeffery Parker’s “Life of W.K.  Parker” 1893), that “in him the genius of an artist struggled with that of a philosopher, and not unfrequently the latter got the worst of the contest.”  He speaks too of his “minute accuracy in observation and boundless memory for details and imagination which absolutely rioted in the scenting out of subtle and often far-fetched analogies.”) Parker was hard at work on Birds, a subject in which his friend and leader also was deeply interested, and was indeed preparing an important book upon it.