No use to tu quoque me. Under the circumstances of the time, warfare has been my business and duty. Ever yours very faithfully, T.H. Huxley. [Two more letters of the year refer to the South Kensington examinations, for which Huxley was still nominally responsible. As before, we see him reluctant to sign the report upon papers which he had not himself examined; yet at the same time doing all that lay in his power to assist by criticising the questions and thinking out the scheme of teaching on which the examination was to be based. He replies to some proposed changes in a letter to Sir M. Foster of December 12:--] I am very sorry I cannot agree with your clients about the examination. They should recollect the late Master of Trinity's aphorism that even the youngest of us is not infallible. I know exactly upon what principles I am going, and so far as I am at present informed that advantage is peculiar to my side. Two points I am quite clear about--one is the exclusion of Amphioxus, and the other the retention of so much of the Bird as will necessitate a knowledge of Sauropsidan skeletal characters and the elements of skeletal homologies in skull and limbs. I have taken a good deal of pains over drawing up a new syllabus--including dogfish--and making room for it by excluding Amphioxus and all of bird except skeleton. I have added Lamprey (cranial and spinal skeleton, NOT face cartilages), so that the intelligent student may know what a notochord means before he goes to embryology. I have excluded Distoma and kept Helix. The Committee must now settle the matter. I have done with it. [On December 27 he writes:--] I have been thinking over the Examinership business without coming to any very satisfactory result. The present state of things is not satisfactory so far as I am concerned. I do not like to appear to be doing what I am not doing. -- would of course be the successor indicated, if he had not so carefully cut his own throat as an Examiner...He would be bringing an action against the Lord President before he had been three years in office!...As I told Forster, when he was Vice-President, the whole value of the Examiner system depends on the way the examiners do their work. I have the gravest doubt about -- steadily plodding through the disgustful weariness of it as you and I have done, or observing any regulation that did not suit his fancy. [With this may be compared the letter of May 19, 1889, to Sir J. Donnelly, when he finally resolved to give up the "sleeping partnership" in the examination. His last letter of the year was written to Sir J. Hooker, when transferring to him the "archives" of the x Club, as the new Treasurer.] 4 Marlborough Place, December 29, 1888. My dear Hooker, All good wishes to you and yours, and many of them.