X OBITUARY 261 



sional attendance at the Wernerian Society brought 

 him into relation with that excellent ornithologist 

 the elder Macgillivray, and enabled him to see and 

 hear Audubon. Moreover, he got lessons in bird- 

 stuffing from a negro, who had accompanied the 

 eccentric traveller Waterton in his wanderings, 

 before settling in Edinburgh. 



No doubt Darwin picked up a great deal of 

 valuable knowledge during his two years' residence 

 in Scotland ; but it is equally clear that next to 

 none of it came through the regular channels of 

 academic education. Indeed, the influence of the 

 Edinburgh professoriate appears to have been 

 mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent ; 

 creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate 

 of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the 

 subjects which had been the occasion of the 

 boredom inflicted upon him by their instrument- 

 ality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor 

 of Chemistry, Darwin found them all " intolerably 

 dull." Forty years afterwards he writes of the 

 lectures of the Professor of Materia Medica that 

 they were " fearful to remember." The Professor 

 of Anatomy made his lectures " as dull as he was 

 himself," and he must have been very dull to have 

 wrung from his victim the sharpest personal remark 

 recorded as his. But the climax seems to have 

 been attained by the Professor of Geology and 

 Zoology, whose praelections were so " incredibly 

 dull " that they produced in their hearer the some- 



