Aurora borealis academica : Aberdeen University appreciations, 1860-1889.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Aurora borealis academica : Aberdeen University appreciations, 1860-1889. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    original work, by which he was favourably known outside his own country—a virtue of great merit in students’ eyes ; here his exceptional endowment found proper scope. The analytic character of his mind, noticeable in the English class, and sometimes doing him injustice there, was in place when ex- pounding discrimination and the great law of rela- tivity as the basis of all intellectual exercise; and as he, day by day, built up in rigidly logical sequence the fabric of his system, we began to understand the power of the instruments he was placing in our hands. He wrote out deliberately all the leading propositions on the blackboard, and greatly assisted the memory as well as the judgment by putting everything under numerical heads. Of course, there were not wanting those who complained that the lectures, though models of lucidity, were “ dry This merely meant that intellectual effort was required to take in their bearing and adjust their perspective. If they were dry to some, it was in the sense that champagne is “dry,” the antithesis being “ sweet” ; they were stimulating and exhilarating to the great majority, and they were conspicuously and scrupulously free from anecdotage and padding and catching digressions, which sometimes sweeten a lecture to effeminate palates. The dreariness of formal logic was relieved by the piquancy of the examples and the sly innuendoes that we read into