280 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHAIR OF 



apparatus in both class and laboratory originated with an 

 old and valued friend, Dr Fraser Thomson of Perth. Each 

 lecture was now illustrated by a series of coloured drawings, 

 a number of spirit and other preparations, occasionally by 

 plates or original drawings as hand-specimens, and by a series 

 of microscopic slides. 



The foregoing observations in connection with the history 

 of the Chair from its foundation a period of one hundred and 

 thirty-four years show that the change from civil to natural 

 history was more or less spontaneous. Moreover, the evolu- 

 tion of a single subject out of the half-dozen comprehended 

 by the older Chair is a feature of interest. Popular favour 

 and public utility, as well as the survival of the fittest, may 

 have determined this condition of things ; but whatever the 

 cause may have been, it is a state pre-eminently suited in every 

 way for St Andrews University, with its unique advantages 

 for marine study and research. Every university may have 

 chemistry, botany, and geology, but only one possesses within 

 a stone-cast a bay teeming with marine life and situated 

 between two large rivers the Tay and the Forth, and with a 

 littoral region unrivalled for its biological riches in sand, 

 rocks, rock-pools, and mud. 



In the University of Edinburgh, again, the change from 

 a plurality of subjects, as embraced in the original Chair of 

 Natural History, to one alone, took nearly one hundred years. 

 The period of one hundred and thirty years in St Andrews, 

 therefore, does not seem long, especially when it is remembered 

 that natural history had no place in its Chair when founded 

 in 1747, and that science has but slowly percolated where the 

 older studies were dominant. That the occupant of a Chair 

 should lecture on six different subjects so recently is a note- 

 worthy fact, since each has now expanded into vast fields of 

 research, and is burdened with a load of special literature in 

 many languages. 



It has been indicated that the foundation of a biological 



