72 The Scottish Naturalist. 



contra-distinguished as Practical, Laboratory, or Field, teaching, 

 the man of original mind—who has acquired his own knowledge 

 by personal investigation — would be quite at home— facile prin- 

 cess. 



If we attempt to 



''See ourselves as others see us : " * 



if we contemplate our University Chairs of Natural Science and 

 their results (e.g.,) through German spectacles, we cannot fail to 

 be humiliated. In Philosophy, Professor Seely asks, " Has not 

 The German School sprung entirely from the Universities ? 

 Were not Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, without exception, 

 University Professors." (p. 215). And it has to be added that 

 the position of German Universities in relation to Natural 

 Science has been similar. The ablest Naturalists of Germany — 

 using the latter word in its widest geographical sense— are, or have 

 been. University Professors. Governments, which are the patrons 

 of the chairs, and which, in some cases at least, have endowed 

 them munificently — compared with the emoluments attached to 

 similar Professoriates in this country — look out for the most dis- 

 Kuished men — inviting them from inferior to superior posi- 

 tions — thus directly rewarding conspicuous merit, and rendering 

 unnecessary the humiliating candidatures to which our own most 

 eminent Naturalists have so frequently to subject themselves. 

 In our own country the most- eminent of our Naturalists are not, 

 and never were, Ujiiversity Professors ; and in the training ot 

 many of them, University Lecturing never had a share.t 

 Thus Darwin, Owen, Huxley, Hooker, Bentham, Berkeley, 

 Murchison, Lyell, Lubbock, Sclater, Wallace, Gwyn-Jeffreys, 

 among the living; Greville, Hugh Miller, and many others, 

 among the dead — do not, or never did — hold University 



* " O wad some power the giftie gie us 

 To see ourselves as others see us : 

 It wad/me mony a blunder free us, 



And foolish notion." — Burns. 



*T Such a man as Hugh Miller was " abnormh sapiens" as Horace calls it; 

 in other words, 



''Of plain good sense, untutored in the schools." 



