Dugald Stewart, which were pointed especially at the English Universities:—"The academical establishments of some parts of Europe," he said, "are not without their use to the historian of the human mind. Immovably moored to the same station by the strength of their cables and the weight of their anchors, they enable him to measure the rapidity of the current by which the rest of mankind is borne along." The demand for reform.The time of the first Reform Bill is that at which the unpopularity of Oxford and Cambridge began to be general. In a series of articles contributed to the "Edinburgh Review," Sir William Hamilton framed an indictment against them which attracted much attention. Within the Universities themselves, the more active minds were fully alive to the necessity for further improvement. Foremost among these was Adam Sedgwick, whose "Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge" appeared in 1833. A Cambridge graduate who published in 1836 a letter[1] on the "Condition, Abuses, and Capabilities of the National Universities," remarks that, if he ventures to point out defects, he will be asked "whether he wishes that our youth should be better educated than Bacon, Locke, and Newton"; but he makes it clear that his own opinions were shared by many Cambridge residents. To foreign observers the peril of our academic situation was equally manifest. Huber, a Professor at Marburg, published his History of the
- ↑ It will be found in a volume of "Tracts" in the University Library, Bb. 26, 33.
