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 Ions- 



o 



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- 

 sophic principles which form the basis of human 

 learning, and without which all sciences would be- 

 come but a vast accumulation of isolated facts and 



