very hour--if he has to be distracted with
the cares of practice?"

There would always be found men, he declared, who would make the
choice between the wealth which may come by successful practice and a
modest competency, when that modest competency was to be combined with
a scientific career and the means of advancing knowledge. It was to
those who made the latter choice that he would entrust the teaching of
the sciences underlying medicine; partly because from the mere
mechanical reason of time these men would be better able to keep pace
with the most recent advances in knowledge, and partly because their
teaching would be stimulated by their own work in advancing knowledge.
In this great matter the world is rapidly advancing towards the
standard of Huxley; as each new appointment is made it becomes more
and more probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and
investigator rather than a practitioner.

In another general question of the politics of medical education
Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency of change is toward his
view. One of the first results of the awakening of medical education
in the middle of this century was a tendency to throw an almost
intolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical student. In the
revolt from the old apprenticeship system, in which the student, from
the very first, gave his chief attention to practice, and was left
almost to himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the principles and
theories underlying his profession, the pendulum swung too far the
other way, and there was almost no branch of the biological and
physical sciences in which he was not expected to go through a severe
training. On the old system the greater part of his time was spent in
the wards of the hospital; on the new system it was only at an
advanced stage of his career that he entered the wards at all, a
great part of his time and energy being spent in the purely scientific
teaching of the medical college. Huxley, although he had largely aided
in the overthrow of the happy-go-lucky older system, of which Mr. Bob
Sawyer was no exaggerated type, was equally severe on the reckless
extensions of the new system. "If I were a despot," he said, "I would
cut down the theoretical branches to a very considerable extent." He
would discard comparative anatomy and botany, materia medica, and
chemistry and physics, except as applied to physiology, from the
medical student's course. At first sight, this