I met Foster at the Athenaeum when I was in town last week, and we had some talk about your "very gentle" stirring of the Oxford pudding. I asked him to let you know when occasion offered, that (as I had already said to Burdon Sanderson) I drew a clear line apud biology between the medical student and the science student. With respect to the former, I consider it ought to be kept within strict limits, and made simply a Vorschule to human anatomy and physiology. On the other hand, the man who is going out in natural science ought to have a much larger dose, especially in the direction of morphology. However, from what I understood from Foster, there seems a doubt about the "going out" in "Natural Science", so I had better confine myself to the medicos. Their burden is already so heavy that I do not want to see it increased by a needless weight even of elementary biology. Very many thanks for the "Zoological articles" just arrived. Ever yours very faithfully, T.H. Huxley. Don't write to the "Times" about anything; look at the trouble that comes upon a harmless man for two months, in consequence. [The following letter, which I quote from the "Yorkshire Herald" of April 11, 1891, was written in answer to some inquiries from Mr. J. Harrison, who read a paper on Technical Education as applied to Agriculture, before the Easingwold Agricultural Club.] I am afraid that my opinion upon the subject of your inquiry is worth very little--my ignorance of practical agriculture being profound. However, there are some general principles which apply to all technical training; the first of these, I think, is that practice is to be learned only by practice. The farmer must be made by and through farm work. I believe I might be able to give you a fair account of a bean plant and of the manner and condition of its growth, but if I were to try to raise a crop of beans, your club would probably laugh consumedly at the result. Nevertheless, I believe that you practical people would be all the better for the scientific knowledge which does not enable me to grow beans. It would keep you from attempting hopeless experiments, and would enable you to take advantage of the innumerable hints which Dame Nature gives to people who live in direct contact with things. And this leads me to the second general principle which I think applies to all technical teaching for school-boys and school-girls, and that is, that they should be led from the observation of the commonest facts to general scientific truths. If I were called upon to frame a course of elementary instruction preparatory to agriculture, I am not sure that I should attempt chemistry, or botany, or physiology or geology, as such. It is a method fraught with the danger of spending too much time and attention on abstraction and theories, on words and notions instead of things. The history of a bean, of a grain of wheat, of a turnip, of a sheep, of a pig, or of a cow properly treated--with the introduction of