Thanks to the University of Edinburgh. 375 



The Lord Provost returned thanks, in very courteous 

 terms, for the honour thus conferred on the Town-Council 

 and himself by the vote of thanks of the British Association. 



Thanks to the University of Edinburgh, 

 Professor Sedgwick said, that he rose to propose the 

 thanks of the British Association to the University of Edin- 

 burgh for the hospitality which they had returned to its 

 members, and the kind manner in which, in every respect, 

 they had co-operated in carrying out the objects of the As- 

 sociation. The subject of his resolution, he said, was linked 

 with the history of Scotland in the most enduring form ; 

 with the history of great intellectual benefits ; and also with 

 the history of civilized Christendom. In one of the little ex- 

 cursions which he had made the other day, he passed by a 

 venerable monument, though very different, indeed, from the 

 numerous noble architectural structures that adorn the 

 neighbourhood of Edinburgh, — he meant that old crumbling 

 kind of castle in which the old family of Napier lived at 

 Merchiston. Napier was associated with the history of this 

 great intellectual capital, and his name was associated most 

 intimately with the history of the University of Edinburgh ; 

 for if it had not been for his discoveries, the progress of 

 scientific discovery must have been clogged by the enormous 

 labour connected with those operations which he facilitated 

 by a kind of intellectual steam-power by the production of 

 those great treatises which pass under his name. He hoped, 

 therefore, amidst the improvements that were going on in 

 the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, that great intellectual mo- 

 nument would never have one sentence of its record oblite- 

 rated, but that it would stand as long as its crumbling walls 

 would hang together — (applause.) It was not, indeed, the 

 fortune of the illustrious University of this city to produce 

 Newton ; and it is not the University of Edinburgh, or of 

 Oxford, or any university in the world, that can make men 

 of this kind. It is such men that make the universities, be- 

 cause they themselves give a soul and an embodied intellect 

 to the university, which called forth the aspirations and the 

 hopes of feeble men — (loud applause.) But though this Uni- 

 versity had not the honour of producing Newton, yet Scot- 



