Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/143

 African College he gave his views in a letter which stated that too much time was given to the classical languages in the great English schools; that he attached great importance to all those branches of practical and theoretical knowledge whose possession goes to constitute an idea of a well-informed gentleman, namely, knowledge of the actual system and the laws of nature, both physical and moral; that in a free country it is important for every man to be trained in political economy and jurisprudence; that mathematics is the best training in reasoning, provided that it is supplemented with the inductive philosophy. He concluded, "Let your College have the glory—for glory it will be—to have given a new impulse to public instruction by placing the Novum Organum for the first time in the hands of young men educating for active life, as a textbook, and as a regular part of their College course."

After four years of work at the Cape Herschel returned to England, arriving in the middle of March, 1838. A great banquet was given him by his scientific contemporaries to which Hamilton came expressly from Dublin. Many honors came to Herschel; he had been knighted in 1831 and now he was made a baronet by Queen Victoria, on the occasion of her coronation (June, 1839); and from Oxford University, as one of the lions of the day he received the degree of D.C.L. In 1840 he removed his residence from Slough to the country house of Collingwood, near the village of Hawkhurst, in the County of Kent; and this remained almost without interruption the scene of his future labors. For eight years his principal work was the reduction of the results of his four years of observation at the Cape. From this retreat he was called forth one year to address the students of Marischel College, Aberdeen, as their lord rector. In the ancient universities the rector was the chosen head of the student body; in the Scottish Universities the office survives in an altered form. The rector is elected by the students, usually on political grounds, and his principal duty is to deliver an address at the beginning of his term of office. The leading politicians of the day were candidates for the honor. Occasionally as in the case of Herschel,