130 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. 



' I will do my best to capture a Wolf's lens for you, on 

 condition that you will not require an affidavit that I 

 saw the wolf make use of it. To stare a wolf in the face 

 in the Black Forest would be enough to throw any 

 optical philosopher into a fit of reflection. 



'With best regards to Lady and Miss Brewster, be- 

 lieve me, my dear Sir David, yours most sincerely/ 



Forbes was not a man who, while he belonged to a 

 corporation, could confine all his energies to his own 

 peculiar subjects, without regard to the working of other 

 departments and to the general well-being and well-work- 

 ing of the whole body. He had not been long established 

 in his chair before his action began to make itself felt, be- 

 yond the bounds of his own class, on all the machinery 

 of the University. The Scottish Universities, like those 

 of the sister kingdom, had suffered from a long torpor, 

 "which lingered somewhat later in our northern seats of 

 learning, after it had passed from Oxford and Cambridge. 

 No doubt, during the last century and the first three 

 decades of this, there had arisen, here and there in the four 

 northern Universities, men of real genius, lights of their 

 times, not likely to be surpassed by those who now fill 

 or may in future fill their places. Principal Robertson, 

 Dr. Thomas Eeid, Dugald Stewart, Sir John Leslie, Dr. 

 John Hunter, Professor Wilson, and many more, were 

 men of whom any university or country might be proud. 

 They not only communicated life and energy to the 

 students who heard them, but they enriched the litera- 

 ture, the philosophy, the science, and the scholarship of 

 their country. But their action was wholly isolated and 

 individual. It began and ended in their own classes, 

 stimulating, or, it may be, only delighting their hearers, 

 but not necessarily producing in their students any solid 

 or certified attainments. Of the several functions of a 

 university life, the professoriate was the only one which 

 was really alive, and it had swallowed up all the rest. 

 Graduation was as good as dead, a mere form, little 



