[August, 
484 Report on Scientific Societies . 
And if England be still foremost among nations in most 
branches of Science, it is owing mainly to that private and 
individual energy of mind which distinguishes the English 
race beyond any other, and in a much less degree only to 
the corporate adtion of the universities or to their system. 
In Germany there are no foundations to secure “ a learned 
leisure ” to the successful student, and no mitres to crown 
the careers of eminent scholars and mathematicians ; more- 
over, within their juridical, medical, and theological facul- 
ties, they afford all that professional instruction of which 
the English Universities — in my opinion, properly so — are 
absolved, either wholly or in part, by the inns of court, the 
hospitals, and certain theological colleges. Yet, notwith- 
standing that defect on the one hand, and the practical bias 
thus imparted on the other hand, the eminence in, and 
devotion to, abstract science and pure learning of the German 
Universities is actually in Europe unsurpassed. 
The causes of the differences noticed in the comparative 
working of the English and German University systems 
appear to me to be two in number. In the first place, the 
English Universities are much less considered as “ seats of 
learning” than as “ seats of education,” if I may use an 
expression actually applied by Mr. Gladstone to them. In 
Germany the general education of youths is supposed to be 
finished at those establishments which, by the age of their 
pupils, if not by their constitution or systems of teaching, 
correspond to the English Grammar and Public Schools. 
At the University the instruction is either special or pro- 
fessional ; special in the case of those who make Science 
their calling, and who frequent principally the so-called 
philosophic faculty ; and professional in the case of others 
(the majority) who wish to become doctors, barristers, lawyers, 
judges, or priests. Teachers at the German Universities, 
instead of doing the work of schoolmasters, — which is rarely 
compatible with the prosecution of independent research, — 
form “ schools,” in the higher sense of the word, in which 
a tradition is handed down from individual to individual and 
from generation to generation. 
All this is different in, or absent from, the English Uni- 
versity system. Even at Cambridge, the mother university 
of so many famous mathematicians, every fresh mathematical 
inquirer has to set up for himself and begin de novo ; for the 
tradition which there exists relates rather to the modes ol 
tuition than to any methods of investigation. And this 
brings me to the second point I wished to notice, as one of 
the main causes of the comparatively small influence the 
