PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 
141 
I cannot see, therefore, from the by-laws that any such 
technical meaning as is contended for has been affixed to the 
expression "a six months' course," so that I must construe the 
words of the testator in that meaning. Indeed, if I am to suppose 
that the testator had in his mind the provisions of these by-laws 
when he drew up this memorandum, and intended students to 
attend a course of 1 00 lectures, I would have expected him to use 
the words "long course," which alone are defined as meaning a 
course of 100 hours' instruction extending throughout two terms. 
Then it is said that at Edinburgh the expression "six months' 
course" is used to denote a course of instruction in medicine 
similar to the "long course" of the by-laws of the Sydney 
University; and that as the testator had in his youth been a 
student of medicine in that University, he used those words in 
the remembered sense of his early days. But I think I am right 
in stating that Sir William Macleay never took his degree in 
medicine, and that from early youth till his death at a very 
advanced age he resided in this colony, where he was for the last 
1 5 years of his life an active member of the Senate of the Sydney 
University. 
It appears to me, therefore, that a circumstance so far distant 
from the time when this will was executed ought not to compel 
the Court to hold that the testator used these words in the sense 
they bore in the University of Edinburgh. 
Again, the evidence before me does, in my opinion, bear out 
the contention of the Senate, that in the present state of the 
science of bacteriology a course of 100 lectures on that subject 
could not benefit students, but would be a mere waste of time 
which could otherwise be more profitably employed — but as that 
science advances, a more extended course could from time to time 
be prescribed. If that is so, it must have been well known to 
the testator, and it is most improbable that he would have tried 
to force the Senate to give at the present time and under all 
circumstances such an extended course of lectures as would be 
useless to the students. 
