PROFESSOR AT HEIDELBERG 223 



Professor of Zoology, who is just now the chief partisan of 

 Rationalism against the Biblical view of Science, a most 

 intelligent young man, whom I had met before. . . . 



1 Yesterday morning I went to Oxford, and am staying with 

 Max Mullen He is a clever young man of the world, whose 

 like I have never yet seen in a professor of philology, and grasps 

 everything, even the scientific matters with which he is less 

 familiar, with extraordinary rapidity. His wife is an English 

 lady, who is also most attractive, well-informed, and pretty, so 

 that I spent two very pleasant days there. Oxford is probably 

 unique of its kind in the world ; its many old, and characteristic- 

 ally beautiful, and well-preserved buildings, with trim grass 

 lawns and handsome trees, are all stately to a degree, and 

 very magnificent. It is quite impossible to picture it at home 

 until one has seen it, and I now understand the devotion of an 

 Englishman to his University. The system works admirably 

 for the education of " gentlemen " but it cannot lead to much 

 in science, and it needs an extraordinary interest in science to 

 prevent a Fellow from sinking into indolence. My journey to 

 Glasgow went off very well. The Thomsons have lately moved 

 to live in the University Buildings; formerly they spent more time 

 in the country. He takes no holiday at Easter, but his brother 

 James, Professor of Engineering at Belfast, and a nephew who 

 is a student there, were with him. The former is a level-headed 

 fellow, full of good ideas, but cares for nothing except engineer- 

 ing, and talks about it ceaselessly all day and all night, so that 

 nothing else can be got in when he is present. It is really 

 comic to see how both brothers talk at one another, and neither 

 listens, and each holds forth about quite different matters. 

 But the engineer is the most stubborn, and generally gets 

 through with his subject. In the intervals I have seen a 

 quantity of new and most ingenious apparatus, and experi- 

 ments, of W. Thomson, which made the two days very interest- 

 ing. He thinks so rapidly, however, that one has to get at the 

 necessary information about the make of the instruments, &c., 

 by a long string of questions, which he shies at. How his 

 students understand him, without keeping him as strictly to 

 the subject as I ventured to do, is a puzzle to me ; still, there 

 were numbers of students in the laboratory, hard at work, and 

 apparently quite understanding what they were about. 



