Item 105 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

4 pp.

RJ finds 'the gentle public much struck with your answer to Lyell [Charles Lyell] as perfectly efficient' ['Of a Liberal Education in General, and with Particular Reference to the Leading Studies of the University of Cambridge', 1845]. RJ thinks WW's 'general principles too as far as I hear meet with great ascent - different opinions as to many of the details of course you are prepared for'. RJ feels great pleasure at WW's 'effort to purify and amend the mathematical training of the place. I have long been convinced that as a matter of training exclusive habits of symbolical reasoning are not merely useless but deleterious and I see very often instances of their bad effects on men of very acute minds'. WW has not converted RJ into liking oral examinations although most of the men at Haileybury to some extent side with WW - 'but I once passed a morning in the schools at Oxford and came away with a profound conviction of the intense injustice of using oral trials for the purposes of assigning relative rank for which men have toiled for years and I do not think that conviction will leave me on this side [of] the grave'. WW's book will probably do good at Cambridge - but only slowly. RJ gives an outline of his current state of health.