Item 45 - Letter from John Herschel

4 pp

Collingwood - The superintendent of the Government Free Schools at the Cape, Mr. Jones, is in Scotland seeking school masters. He is then going on a visit to Belgium, Holland and Germany 'with a view to examine personally into the details and principles of the methods of teaching there practiced'. Can WW provide him with any letters of introduction and suggestions. JH will introduce him to Lambert A. J. Quetelet who has relevant statistics. Mr Jones 'is a very superior person' and is superintendent of a brand-new plan of colonial education. WW's 'book is a tough [The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, 2 vols., 1840] - one...You are too a-prori rather for me - as soon as one has worked ones way up to a general law you...come cranking in and tell me it is a fundamental idea innate in everybody's mind - a necessary truth or very likely to prove such in one [or] thousand years hence'.