UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 55 



versities. That is its recognition as a Faculty, or branch, 

 of study demanding recognition and special organisation, 

 on account of its bearing on the wants of mankind. 

 The Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine, are 

 technical schools, intended to equip men who have re- 

 ceived general culture, with the special knowledge which 

 is needed for the proper performance of the duties of 

 clergymen, lawyers, and medical practitioners. 



When the material well-being of the country de- 

 pended upon rude pasture and agriculture, and still 

 ruder mining ; in the days when all the innumerable 

 applications of the principles of physical science to prac- 

 tical purposes were non-existent even as dreams ; days 

 which men living may have heard their fathers speak 

 of; what little physical science could be seen to bear 

 directly upon human life, lay within the province of 

 Medicine. Medicine was the foster-mother of Chem- 

 istry, because it has to do with the preparation of drugs 

 and the detection of poisons ; of Botany, because it en- 

 abled the physician to recognise medicinal herbs ; of 

 Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, because the man 

 who studied Human Anatomy and Physiology for purely 

 medical purposes was led to extend his studies to the rest 

 of the animal world. 



"Within my recollection, the only way in which a 

 student could obtain anything like a training in Phys- 

 ical Science, was by attending the lectures of the Pro- 

 fessors of Physical and Natural Science attached to the 

 Medical Schools. But, in the course of the last thirty 



