CH. ii EARLY LIFE IN LONDON 25 



Herbert New, Langton-Sandford, Farrer-Herschell 

 Bagehot, Jessel, Richard Hutton, Osier, William 

 Caldwell Roscoe, Henry Thompson, and Edward Fry 

 had either taken their degrees in the University of 

 London when I first entered the College in 1 848 or 

 did so shortly afterwards. 



The abolition of religious tests for degrees at 

 Oxford and Cambridge naturally to some extent 

 affected University College, as many exceptionally 

 brilliant men were drawn away by the superior induce- 

 ments offered by the older seats of learning. But in 

 spite of this my Alma Mater held her own, and for 

 another half-century was the chief home of the higher 

 liberal education in the metropolis, embracing in her 

 arms Jew and Gentile, bond and free. Now, in 1906, 

 she has entered upon a new phase of existence in 

 which she bids fair to outstrip her former record of 

 usefulness, for she has become an integral part of the 

 newly reconstituted Teaching University of London, 

 and will henceforward bear a leading part in the 

 building up of an educational edifice worthy of the 

 chief city of the Empire. 



De Morgan was certainly/^70 princeps among the 

 teachers of mathematics of his day, and he inspired the 

 greatest enthusiasm for the subject in the minds of his 

 pupils. My cousin W. S. Jevons, the eminent econo- 

 mist, wrote of him : " One learns more and more to 

 adore him as an unfathomable fund of mathematics." 



But De Morgan was not merely a mathematician 

 and a unique teacher ; he was one of the profoundest 

 and subtlest thinkers of the nineteenth century. His 

 was a most original mind, and his method of instruction 

 was quite different from that of the ordinary school- 

 master. The trouble he took with his students was 

 extraordinary. On joining his class one saw at once 



