CAMBRIDGE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 319 
chases and donations, have had a powerful effect in 
awakening the attention of the younger members to 
this most fascinating science: these sources of in- 
formation, without which the student can make no 
effectual progress, are open to the inspection and 
use of every one. If we may entertain the hope 
that, at no very distant period, there will arise a 
school of British zoology, there are strong reasons 
for supposing its chief seat will be in our univer- 
sities ; and as that of Cambridge has long taken the 
lead in the cultivation of physical science, it seems 
highly probable that, with its present institutions, it 
will continue to maintain this distinction. So long 
as natural history was limited to a study of names, 
a comparison of specimens, and a discrimination of 
species, proficiency was always within the reach of 
the laborious compiler, the accumulating collector, 
and the minute discriminator. But so soon as 
labours of this sort ceased to assume more than a 
secondary importance, and they were discovered to 
be but instruments for attaining a higher degree of 
knowledge, from that moment the necessity will be 
felt of calling to our aid the exercise of superior 
mental faculties,— faculties which are rarely de- 
veloped but by the expanding influence of an 
academic education. Hence it follows, that if we 
may expect to meet with such qualifications in any 
one particular class of the community, more than in 
another, they will be found among the students of 
our universities, early initiated in those sound philo- 
sophie principles which form the basis of human 
learning, and without which all sciences would be- 
come but a vast accumulation of isolated facts and 
