126 GOODSIR AS A LECTURER. 



versity, or had so many attached pupils. It is true 

 that he had the advantage of having them around 

 him, and knowing many of them personally in the 

 rooms ; but it was in proving his thorough fitness for 

 his office, and his painstaking efforts to indoctrinate 

 their minds, that won him the confidence and high 

 esteem of his students. They looked upon him as a 

 master of his art and a philosopher in science. They 

 were first led to believe in him, then they came to 

 admire and love him. His singleness of purpose, his 

 devotion to duty, his conscientious wish to elevate the 

 thought of his pupils and to promote the interests of 

 the university at large, were deserving of all praise. 



In aiming at distinctness, and a rigid demon- 

 stration of the anatomy, a formality or preciseness sui 

 generis became a dominant feature in Goodsir's lec- 

 turing. He was fond of treating his subject in a 

 series of propositions, and in a way that recalled the 

 inexorable logic and precise style of the Scottish meta- 

 physician of a bygone day, without flow of language 

 or any special diversion or enlivenment. In mani- 

 festing his earnestness, directness, and completeness — 

 his three great attributes as a teacher — it may be said 

 that neither rhetoric nor poetic brilliancy could much 

 avail him ; it was otherwise with Knox in his histori- 

 cal flights. Though imperceptible to others, Goodsir 

 was not without a vein oil poesy mingled with a large 

 aesthetic feeling that enhanced the beauty of form 

 in his eyes, and rendered more patent the loveliness 

 and adaptation in the mechanism and physiological 



