groove. After the manner of most young men with an aptitude for
literature, he competed for a prize poem in John Wilson's class, but he
did not win. When he was in low spirits--a mood so much more common in
early manhood than we usually remember afterwards--he drove them away by
energetic bursts of work. On one occasion, he says, 'When I was so bad
that I thought I should have gone distracted, I shut myself up, and for
three days studied all the most abstruse works that I could find on the
origin of government and society, such as Godwin, Goguet, Rousseau, _et
caetera_, from seven in the morning till twelve at night, which quite
set me up again.' 'Natural history,' at another time he tells his
sister, 'is my principal pursuit at present, and from half-past six in
the morning to twelve at night I am incessantly at work, with the
exception of about two hours for exercise, and two more for meals.'

Sir William Hamilton was the chief intellectual influence in Edinburgh
at this time, and Greg followed his lectures with lively interest. He
was still more attracted by the controversy that then raged in Edinburgh
and elsewhere on the value of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism. Hamilton,
as all students of contemporary philosophy are aware, denounced the
pretensions of Phrenology with curious vehemence and asperity. It was
the only doctrine, his friends said, that he could not even tolerate. On
Animal Magnetism he held a very different opinion, and he wrote to Greg
encouraging his enthusiasm in that direction. 'There has always,' he
said, 'seemed to me a foundation of truth in the science, however
overlaid with a superstructure of credulity and enthusiasm.... I foresee
as great a clamour in favour of the science as there is at present a
contempt and prejudice against it, and both equally absurd.'

It was in this field, and not in literature or philosophy, that Greg's
interests were most actively aroused during his university career. When
his life as a student came to an end, he returned home with his whole
faculties of curiosity and enthusiasm concentrated upon natural history,
phrenology, and animal magnetism. 'I have a canine appetite for natural
history,' he told his brother in 1828. He describes with all the zeal of
a clever youth of nineteen how busily he is employed in macerating
skulls, dissecting unsavoury creatures before breakfast, watching the
ants reduce a viper to a skeleton for him, and striving with all his
might t