at 
x OBITUARY 261 
sional attendance at the Wernerian Society brought 
him into relation with that excellent ornithologist 
the elder Macgillivray, and enabled him to see and 
hear Audubon. Moreover, he got lessons in bird- 
stuffing from a negro, who had accompanied the 
eccentric traveller Waterton in his wanderings, 
before settling in Edinburgh. _ 
No doubt Darwin picked up a great deal of 
valuable knowledge during his two years’ residence 
in Scotland ; but it is equally clear that next to 
none of it came through the regular channels of 
academic education. Indeed, the influence of the 
Edinburgh professoriate appears to have been 
mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent ; 
creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate 
of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the 
subjects which had been the occasion of the 
boredom inflicted upon him by their instrument- 
ality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor 
of Chemistry, Darwin found them all “intolerably 
dull.” Forty years afterwards he writes of the 
lectures of the Professor of Materia Medica that 
they were “fearful to remember.” The Professor 
of Anatomy made his lectures “as dull as he was 
himself,” and he must have been very dull to have 
wrung from his victim the sharpest personal remark 
recorded as his. But the climax seems to have 
been attained by the Professor of Geology and 
Zoology, whose prelections were so “ incredibly 
dull” that they produced in their hearer the some- 
