April 17, 1884] 



NA TURE 



577 



THE THREE HUA'DREDTH ANNIVERSARY 



UE THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 

 'T'HIS week the University of Edinburgh is holding its 



■*■ Tercentenary Festival. An elaborate programme 

 of festivities is being gone through by a collection of guests 

 of literary, scientific, and social eminence such as rarely 

 graces a British or even any foreign University seat. A 

 mere recital of the list of those who are to be present to 

 receive honorary degrees would be interesting, as showing 

 the scope and catholicity of modern University culture. 

 We see Hermite, Helmholtz, Pasteur, Haeckel, Virchow, 

 Browning, Renan, Bishop Lightfoot, and Principals 

 Tulloch and Rainy, capped by the same academic 

 hand. 



It may not be without interest to our readers to dwell 

 for a moment on certain parts of the history of an 

 organism whose appreciatory functions are so varied and 

 at first sight even contradictory. 



Three hundred years, though not an infant's age, is 

 after all no great age for a University. Any uncertainty 

 therefore that surrounds the early history of the University 

 of Edinburgh is more the result of initial obscurity than 

 the glamour of remote antiquity. She is, as some one has 

 said, hopelessly modern. Nevertheless, her history is in 

 some respects a very remarkable one. What has now 

 developed into one of the largest of the Universities of 

 Europe, numbering its students by thousands, began as a 

 college for the " town's bairns," under the patronage of 

 the Town Council, who in fact remained its rulers until 

 1859. There can be litlle doubt that the comparatively 

 modern date of the foundation of the college, and the 

 peculiar^ nature of the governing body favoured its growth 

 and development into what has claims to be the most 

 liberally constituted of the Scottish Universities. 



A glance at the chronology of science will show that 

 the opening of the new Town's College in Edinburgh in 

 1583 falls at the time when the tide of progress in 

 physical and mathematical science was just beginning to 

 rise over Europe. 



Napier of Merchiston was living hard by ; Gilbert was 

 probably collecting material for his great work on the 

 magnet ; and Galileo and Kepler were doing great things 

 for physical science. 



Nevertheless, the progress of the young institution was 

 not at the outset very remarkable. This arose partly from 

 the miserable poverty of its early endowment and of Scot- 

 land itself, partly from the plan of " regenting " on which 

 it was organised, which compelled each of four regents to 

 carr)' his students in four years through the whole course 

 of the seven liberal arts of the mediaeval curriculum. This 

 plan, so fatal to special excellence in teaching or learning, 

 continued until 1708, when it was finally abolished, and 

 professors of the separate subjects established. iJuring 

 this first century, however, the patrons had already 

 engrafted the germs of the modern University by appoint- 

 ing professors of separate subjects, which were some- 

 times outside the curriculum of the regents altogether, 

 sometimes auxiliary to it. In this way arose some of the 

 present chairs of the faculty of arts, and in this way 

 originated many of the chairs that now form the separate 

 faculties of theology, law, and medicine. 



The powers of the Town Council left them absolutely 

 unfettered in the founding of new chairs, and they pro- 

 ceeded in this work guided by their own views as to the 

 necessities of the times, and aided by the best advice they 

 could obtain inside, or more frequently outside, the 

 University. They were not always quite judicious or 

 wholly unbiased in their procedure, and many pf their 

 reforms were carried out in the face of bitter hostility from 

 within the University. Yet it cannot be denied that, on 

 the whole, their action as patrons and founders of 



* Peculiar from a University point of view, for the older Universities as a 

 rule were privileged corporations independent of, nay, often antagonistic to, 

 the municipalities where they were situated. 



chairs was for the good of the University. The 

 sectarian feuds which occasioned the Disruption of 

 the Established Church ultimately led, in 1859, to 

 the severance of the close tie between the Town 

 Council and the Town's College, long ere then grown 

 into a full-blown University. There is no need here to 

 dwell on the dark side of the picture of the management 

 of the University by the Town Council. Their mis- 

 deeds are, we may hope, not likely to be imitated by 

 modern patrons, and their enlightened policy in the 

 foundation of chair after chair as the wants of the institu- 

 tion grew is, after all, the more important part of the 

 story, and well worthy to be read in this day of infant 

 Universities and of experiments on the large scale in the 

 remodelling of older Universities of the kind. 



.A.S most of our readers probably know, the strength 

 or weakness of a .Scottish University depends wholly 

 on the professoriate, with whom lie the whole of 

 the teaching and disciplinary duties. Within certain 

 limits set him by the Ordinances, and with some restric- 

 tions owing to the presence of colleagues in allied 

 departments, a Scottish professor within his own class- 

 room is absolutely free, and may develop into a great 

 success, a mediocrity, or a great failure, according to cir- 

 cumstances ; and with him rises or falls the department 

 intrusted to his care. The system has its drawbacks 

 sufficiently obvious ; but it has this to say for itself, that 

 it is an economical arrangement, and that it has produced 

 a large body of citizens sufficiently well educated to take 

 rather more than their own share of the higher employ- 

 ments in the British Empire! It will thus be seen that 

 the interest of the educational history of a Scottish Uni- 

 versity centres mainly in the record of the occupants of 

 its various chairs. We offer a few desultory remarks on 

 this subject, chiefly from the scientific point of view, re- 

 ferring those who are interested in the matter generally 

 to the recently published "Story of the University of 

 Edinburgh," lay Principal Sir Alexander Grant. 



The earliest foundation of a special scientific chair was 

 that of mathematics, to which the Town Council called 

 James Gregory in 1674. This distinguished mathemati- 

 cian and physicist, the author of various theorems in 

 pure mathematics and of several great ideas in optics 

 (represented to the mind of the ordinary student by 

 Gregory's "Series" and the Gregorian telescope), came of 

 an Aberdeenshire family (related, by the way, to the 

 notorious Rob Roy Macgregor), which, during the last 

 three hundred years, has furnished something like a score 

 of distinguished professors and men of science to the 

 Scottish and English Universities. Gregory was not the 

 first nominal Professor of Mathematics, but he was the 

 first professor who had more than the name. After 

 his brief but brilliant tenure, the office, with but little 

 intermission, was filled by a fine of distinguished fol- 

 lowers, among who.ii we must content ourselves with 

 naming David Gregory, who became Savilian Professor 

 of .\stronomy at Oxford, who was appointed on the urgent 

 recommendation of Newton himself, who was in fact 

 the friend and interpreter of Newton, and was by him 

 reckoned worthy, along with Halley, to continue the great 

 work of the co-ordination of celestial phenomena begun 

 in the "Principia." He has the credit of introduc- 

 ing the Newtonian philosophy into the curriculum of 

 Edinburgh thirty years before it obtained a similar place 

 in the University of its author. Colin Maclaurin is the 

 greatest perhaps of all the men of science that Edinburgh 

 has produced ; of his wide culture and extended acti- 

 vity we may give some idea when we say that he was a 

 worthy successor to Newton in pure and applied mathe- 

 matics, that he was a great teacher of mathematics and 

 physics, a great popular lecturer in his day (one of the 

 first of the scientific tribe of sucb, perhaps), that he was 

 an authority on life assurance, on surveying, on geo- 

 graphical exploration, that he was an excellent classical 



