ognised the importance of
encouraging research. You propose to provide means by which young men,
who may be full of zeal for a literary or for a scientific career, but
who also may have mistaken aspiration for inspiration, may bring their
capacities to a test, and give their powers a fair trial. If such a one
fail, his endowment terminates, and there is no harm done. If he
succeed, you may give power of flight to the genius of a Davy or a
Faraday, a Carlyle or a Locke, whose influence on the future of his
fellow-men shall be absolutely incalculable.

You have enunciated the principle that "the glory of the university
should rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars, and not
upon their numbers or buildings constructed for their use." And I look
upon it as an essential and most important feature of your plan that the
income of the professors and teachers shall be independent of the number
of students whom they can attract. In this way you provide against the
danger, patent elsewhere, of finding attempts at improvement obstructed
by vested interests; and, in the department of medical education
especially, you are free of the temptation to set loose upon the world
men utterly incompetent to perform the serious and responsible duties of
their profession.

It is a delicate matter for a stranger to the practical working of your
institutions, like myself, to pretend to give an opinion as to the
organisation of your governing power. I can conceive nothing better than
that it should remain as it is, if you can secure a succession of wise,
liberal, honest, and conscientious men to fill the vacancies that occur
among you. I do not greatly believe in the efficacy of any kind of
machinery for securing such a result; but I would venture to suggest
that the exclusive adoption of the method of co-optation for filling the
vacancies which must occur in your body, appears to me to be somewhat
like a tempting of Providence. Doubtless there are grave practical
objections to the appointment of persons outside of your body and not
directly interested in the welfare of the university; but might it not
be well if there were an understanding that your academic staff should
be officially represented on the board, perhaps even the heads of one or
two independent learned bodies, so that academic opinion and the views
of the outside world might have a certain influence in that most
important matter, the appointment of your professors? I t