NATURAL HISTORY AT ST ANDREWS 275 



of history with such reflections as would assist the student 

 in forming rational views of the causes and consequences of 

 events.' l He appears, however, probably, amongst other 

 things, to the lack of attendance, to have lectured only one 

 or two sessions out of his forty-two, though he regularly 

 attended meetings of the college for discipline and business 

 every Saturday, and was of great service in managing the 

 complicated financial affairs of the college. So far, therefore, 

 as regards teaching or original work, the professorship seems 

 to have been chiefly nominal for this long period. The students 

 of the day, it is true, were unable to take extra classes, that 

 is, classes not in the regular curriculum for the Church, or for 

 some of the liberal professions. 2 Moreover, their time was 

 fully engaged by the compulsory classes, some of which 

 occupied two or three hours daily. 



There is little doubt that this condition of things gave 

 anxiety to some of the able men who filled other chairs at 

 this period, so that shortly before the Universities' Com- 

 mission of 1827, the United College, with a prescience which 

 did the members credit, took the important step of appointing 

 a special lecturer on natural history, probably stimulated to 

 this action by the vigorous influence of Dr Chalmers, then 

 Professor of Moral Philosophy, who maintained, like the late 

 eloquent Principal Cunningham of St Mary's College, that 

 attendance at natural history, including botany, should be 

 held indispensable to students of divinity, and the former 

 of whom urged, with characteristic energy, the proper equip- 

 ment of such a Chair. The first and only lecturer was Mr John 

 M'Vicar, a licentiate of the Church (afterwards Dr M'Vicar of 

 Moffat, and author of the Philosophy of the Beautiful), and 

 whom in his later years (1857) the writer had the pleasure of 

 hearing in Edinburgh as he discoursed in a fascinating manner 

 on this subject with his ingenious models and diagrams. He 

 lectured in the United College, first on the utility of the science, 



1 Evidence, Univ. Com. Scot., 1827, p. 29. J Op. cit. 



