126 THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
friends. Dr. Samuel Brown, Professor Edward Forbes, and Hugh 
Miller, have followed one another to the grave within a brief period, 
and ere the past year drew to a close, Dr. George Wilson was added 
to the number of those who live only in honored memory. Dying 
at the early age of forty-one, when a career full of rich promise 
appeared only opening before him, and his mind seemed to be 
ripening in many ways for a great life-work: those who knew his 
capacity and his genius regard all that he had accomplished as insig- 
nificant indeed when compared with what he would have done if spared 
to those years in which men chiefly fulfil the promises of youth. Yet 
what he did accomplish, amid many and sore impediments to progress, 
is neither poor nor of small amount. Nor is it a light thing now to 
remember that one whose years of public life have been so few, and 
even these encroached on by the ever increasing impediments of failmg 
health, has been laid in his grave amid demonstrations of public sorrow 
such as have rarely indeed been accorded, in that native city of his, to 
Edinburgh’s greatest men. This was due even more to the genial 
kindliness and worth of a noble Christian man, than to the unwearied 
zeal of a popular public teacher, and an enthusiastic student of science. 
His loss to his university is great, but to his friends it is irreparable. 
In him the faith of science, and the nobler faith of the Christian, were 
blended into perfect harmony; for no doubt springing from half- 
revealed truths of science ever marred the serene joy of his faith while 
looking at the things which are not seen. Prejudice and falsehood, 
ignorance and vice, were felt by him to be the common foes of both ; 
and pardon me, if I add, that no man I have ever known carried more 
genially and unobtrusively, yet more thoroughly, his earnest Christian 
faith into all the daily business and the duties of life. 
When a man of such genuine kindliness and worth is suddenly call- 
ed away in his prime, with still so much of his life-work seemingly 
waiting its accomplishment, it is as when a brave vessel founders in 
mid-ocean. The wild eddy of the troubled waters gathers around the 
fatal gulf, and a ery of sympathetic sorrow rises up as the news is 
borne along to distant shores. But the ocean settles back to its wonted 
flow where that gallant bark went down, and the busy world soon 
returns to its old absorbing occupations. But there are those to whom 
that foundered bark has been the shipwreck of a life’s hopes; and to 
me the loss of my life-long friend and brother will make life’s future 
years wear ‘a shadow they could never wear before. 
