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when it had begun to flag in the hands of a less skilful assistant, the firm kindliness by which he kept perfect order in classes of eighty or ninety boys without appearing to exercise any authority but that of a friend who was interested in their progress, of all these there is no space here to speak, but they are deeply fixed in the recollection of thousands of his former pupils. He often regretted that the numbers at the school, the size of Glasgow, and the distance at which the boys lived from the school and from his own residence, made it impossible for him to have as much personal knowledge of them as he had had in Belfast. But he nevertheless took a great interest in their welfare; was constantly occupied in finding situations for them in mercantile houses, advising them after they left school, giving testimonials to those who sought for educational appointments, sometimes corresponding with those who had gone, as so many young Scotchmen go, to the colonies or India. No man was more willing to spend and be spent in the service of others, and that in ways which the world, and often even his own family, knew nothing of.

Absorbed as he was during the day by the duties of his profession, Dr. Bryce was an indefatigable worker in the evening hours. While at Belfast, he had published, in conjunction with a mercantile friend, a practical treatise on Book-keeping, and afterwards a treatise on Algebra, both of which have gone through several editions. While at Glasgow, he also wrote an Introduction to Mathematical Geography and Astronomy, a book on the Decimal System, for whose general introduction into our coins, weights, and measures he was a zealous advocate, and a Cyclopædia of Geography. This last was a work of great labour, which occupied his leisure during many years. Such intervals of time as he could spare from these literary undertakings he filled up with the study of Italian, Gaelic, and Hebrew (for he always had a great taste for languages, and made himself, while still a youth, an excellent German and a tolerable Irish scholar), and with the reading of books of travel, from which he took copious notes, to be afterwards used in his class-teaching of geography, and in the preparation of the Cyclopædia just mentioned.

While this furnished ample occupation for the working part of the year, he devoted some weeks in every summer to geological excursions, generally in the company of his two sons, whom he loved to associate in his own pursuits. In the years 1850 and 1853 he visited the lake country of Cumberland, and wrote papers on the evidences of glacial action there, and on other geological phenomena of that beautiful district. Other summers were spent in the Scottish Highlands,-several being devoted to a thorough examination of the geology of the island of Arran, which resulted in the composition of a book in which he presented a very complete account of all that is most interesting in it, including not only its fauna and flora, but its pre-historic antiquities. Still later, he turned his attention to the Isles of Skye and Raasay; and last of all to those remarkable strata in the extreme north-western Highlands which have of late years excited so much discussion among geologists. The results of these inquiries were embodied in a long series of scientific papers, which may be found in the Transactions of the British Association, of the Geological Societies of London and Edinburgh, and of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow. Of this last he had become a member on his settling in that city; and during his residence there he was one of its most active members, serving always on its council, and for three years as its president. The annual addresses which he delivered as president are perhaps the most complete evidence now remaining of the great range and variety of his scientific attainments, which extended over nearly all of the chief depart

ments into which scientific inquiry has extended itself. In them he reviewed the work of the past year, and discussed some of the chief problems now presented to students of nature, with a fulness of knowledge and a soundness of judgment which would have been admirable in any one, but were doubly remarkable as possessed by one who had only the fragments of his leisure to devote to these difficult subjects.

In April 1873, Dr. Bryce met with a serious accident, the rupture of one of the tendons of the knee, which confined him to bed for many weeks, and at one time endangered his general health. This led to his resigning his office in the Glasgow High School; and in the autumn of 1874 his resignation took effect, and he came to live in Edinburgh, where two of his younger brothers already resided. There he speedily became a member of the Royal Society and the Geological Society, and enjoyed the greater opportunities that were now open to him of literary and scientific work, while continuing to interest himself actively in whatever concerned the welfare of his old profession and of Scottish education generally. Convinced of the importance of organizing the profession in a body which should exert some control over its members, and be able to guarantee their fitness, he had as far back as 1847, taken part in founding the Educational Institute of Scotland; had been one of its earliest presidents; and a warm advocate for the establishment of an unsectarian, though religious, system of national education. Partly through the obstinacy or ignorance of the Government, partly from the apathy of the educational profession itself, which was too much divided by ecclesiastical partisanship to unite for a common purpose, the Institute, although it continues to exist, has not obtained the full official recognition which it claimed; and Dr. Bryce, who was himself very free from party passions, had latterly begun to feel that in the present state of parties there was little likelihood of its success. He had, however, not relaxed in his zeal for the preservation of the distinctive merits of Scottish education, which he regarded as having suffered grievously from the English Privy Council system. When the Edinburgh Education Board was threatened with extinction last winter, he was one of the first to set on foot an agitation for its maintenance, as offering some security that Scottish schools should not be wholly assimilated to the inferior type of elementary school which exists south of the Tweed; and at the time of his death he was actively at work as one of the honorary secretaries of the association formed for that purpose. Himself a graduate of Glasgow University in days when graduation was much less frequent there than it has now become (he took his M.A. degree in 1832, and received the honorary degree of LL.D. in 1857), he had always been anxious to see the rights of the graduates to a voice in the management of University affairs recognised, and their influence used to popularize the constitution of our Scottish Universities, and introduce various reforms there. With this view he formed the Glasgow Graduates Association in 1852,—the first of the kind, if we are not mistaken, that existed in Scotland,—and, with the aid of a few like-minded friends, he kept the question before the public, until, by the University Act of 1858, the principle he had been contending for was admitted, though, as he thought, in too small a measure to produce all the desired results. He therefore continued to urge the claims of the graduates at the meetings of the General Council in Glasgow, in conjunction with his eldest brother, Dr. R. J. Bryce, and his valued friend Mr. Cleland Burns, and last spring gave evidence before the University Commissioners upon the subject.

Sprung from an old Covenanting stock, brought up in a pious home, and

Jan. 1, 1878.

THE LATE DR. JAMES BRYCE.

by his own matured convictions a firm Presbyterian and a sincere Voluntary, Dr. Bryce was throughout his life an active and earnest member in Ireland of the Church founded by his father, and, after he came to Scotland, of the United Presbyterian Church. While in Glasgow, he was for many years an elder in the Shamrock Street Church, of which he had been one of the founders; and in Edinburgh he was again elected to the eldership in the church at Morningside, of which Dr. Mair is pastor. No one could be more zealous or faithful in the discharge of his presbyterial duties. In Glasgow, fatigued as he was by the labours of the week, he undertook the management of the Shamrock Street Church Sabbath school, organized it from the first, and taught in it two hours every Sabbath, even when his family, who feared the effect on his health, endeavoured to persuade him to leave this work to younger men. The supposed difficulties of reconciling the conclusions of science with the truths of Christianity cast no shadow upon his pure and truthful spirit. Although a thorough man of science, accepting everything which geology has proved, and never hesitating to defend it when assailed, he was none the less a simple and pious Christian. Nature and revelation were to him only two different modes in which the wisdom and goodness of the Most High were set forth to men, and he never admitted that there could be any contradiction between them. Indeed, his love of nature and delight in her study were intensified by the clearness with which he saw God manifested in the beauty of the world and the skill of its workmanship.

After his settlement in Edinburgh, a happy and peaceful old age seemed to be opening up before him. He was in the midst of friends who valued him, with leisure both for his scientific studies, and for the church work, which he had gladly resumed under a pastor to whom he was attached; and though he was over seventy years of age, his strength and vigour seemed unimpaired. Many years of honour and usefulness might still have been predicted for him. But human predictions are vain. On the 10th of July last, he left Edinburgh for a geological expedition to Sutherlandshire, where he wished to investigate once more the fossiliferous strata of Assynt and Durness. On his way north he spent a night at Inverness, and started early on the morning of the 11th for Foyers on Loch Ness. Landing there from the steamer, he walked two miles along the loch to the pass of Inverfarigaig, a romantic little glen coming down to the loch on its south-east side, where there occurs an outburst of granite which he was anxious to examine. Rambling up the glen, he came to a spot where there has fallen from the granite cliff above a mass of loose rocks, which hung, so to speak, on the steep slope that descends from the base of the cliff to the murmuring brook below. He halted under this mass, in whose appearance there was nothing to indicate danger, and tried one of the blocks with his hammer to see what the rock was. The stroke loosened the cohesion of the pile. Several blocks fell, struck him, and carried him six or seven yards down towards the stream. All must have been over in a moment; so that there can have been no suffering, and probably not even the knowledge of what was happening. Terribly sudden as such a death seems, it was in reality more merciful than terrible; for he was spared the weakness and decay of age, and the bitterness of parting from those he loved. He had so lived as to be always ready to die; and he died in the pursuit to which so many of his best and happiest hours had beeen given, a true martyr of science, wrestling with the secrets of nature like a soldier on the battle-field, under the shadow of the everlasting mountains which he loved so well.

This is an imperfect record of a life which, though in one sense calm and uneventful, was full of constant labours and efforts of many kinds,—a life whose results ought not to be estimated merely with reference to the respect and honour which they won for him; for the results of any noble life, and most conspicuously of a great teacher's, through whose hands thousands of boys of the middle and upper class have passed, perpetuate themselves among people and in places where his name has never been heard. The tastes and interests which such a man implants in his pupils, the elevation he gives to their thoughts and purposes, the example of devotion to duty, truthfulness, kindliness, which he sets before them,—all these are as much a part of his contribution to God's work in the world, as any books he writes or any institutions he founds. And few teachers have had such opportunities of doing that work as were his, or have used them so well. Of his scientific attainments and powers, especially his wonderfully keen observation, something has already been said, as well as of the physical energy which made him in his younger days the best walker in Belfast, thinking nothing of thirty-five or forty miles in a day, and enabled him to the end of his life to scramble up the rugged peaks of our Highland mountains. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as a mountain excursion,-the plants, the birds, the rocks, were all known to him and dear to him; and how great his delight, when from the summit a grand prospect disclosed itself, and he pointed out, far away on the horizon, other pinnacles which in former years he had scaled and studied! It was, one may suppose, the same imaginative quality in his intellect which made him so fond of poetry and history, that gave him this intense pleasure in natural beauty, for he had no turn for drawing, and comparatively little interest in any form of art.

Higher and rarer than all his intellectual gifts, were those qualities of character and heart by which, most of all, he lives in the loving memory of his friends. In him a perfect simplicity and humility and refinement were united with a brightness and gaiety of manner which brought cheerfulness into every company he entered. His temper had originally been warm, according to the report of those who knew him as a boy; but in middle life no one could have discovered this, and it was always sweet and equable. Constantly disposed to think the best of others, and to find excuses for their faults or weaknesses, he was singularly indifferent to personal gossip, so that friends sometimes laughingly complained that it was no use talking to him about his neighbours' concerns. But when either sympathy or active help was to be given to another, no one gave it more promptly or more delicately; and many instances have come to light, even since his death, in which his active benevolence had been at work, cheering and aiding and encouraging persons of whom his family had never heard, and who had no claim on him except that which was to him more than enough that they were God's weak or unhappy children. Under the cordial frankness of manner which made him so popular in society, there lay concealed an unbending rectitude of purpose, and the utmost constancy in his attachment both to those whom he had once made his friends and to the principles in which he had been brought up. Although life had its disappointments for him as for most of us, no experience of the world, no moroseness of advancing age, ever dulled that genial heartiness, or soured the perfect sweetness of his temper; for it was a sweetness that came not only from nature, but from grace also, the fruit of long years spent in unselfish service to his fellow-men, from his youth upwards looking to God and walking with God in trustful dependence on His promises.

PROFESSOR FLINT AND THE LOGIC OF THEISM.*

BY THE REV. JAMES WARDROP.

In the pursuit of truth, when we come to the doctrine of the existence and character of God, we reach the loftiest range of natural knowledge. From this knowledge being the loftiest, two things are the result in reference to it. On the one hand, the reward of attaining it is very great,-great both speculatively and practically,-to the mind, for the benefit of itself and all its other knowledge; and to the heart, for the training of its affections, and for the satisfaction of its longings. On the other hand, the difficulty of attaining a theistic doctrine in a reasoned or philosophical form is as great as is its reward.

A cursory acquaintance with the speculations of the great theists, from before Plato till after Paley, will bring this difficulty into full view; and the view will be deepened as that acquaintance enlarges. Hitherto, the difficulty has been too great to be well surmounted, so far, at least, as the evidence of the divine existence is concerned.

There is an observation which cannot fail to be made by all who attend to the past progress of theistic investigation, and which, in connection with a certain direction of thought that has grown exceedingly strong in the present day, may suggest a reasonable hope of some great advance speedily to be taken by such investigation in the time to come. The result of any attempt made at the attainment of any kind of truth, depends on the degree of perfection with which the true method of knowledge generally, and the true method of the special department in hand, have been observed. Our faculties of knowledge have been made subject to laws; and if, by our processes of knowing, we are to get upsides with reality and have certain truth deposited in the mind, it is imperative that these laws be detected and obeyed. They are the method of knowledge, and method is the way to success in knowing. Now, the observation is, that all through the line of theistic inquiry the methods of the inquirers have varied fundamentally from one another. Not only has one inquirer employed a fundamentally different method from another, but the same inquirer has employed fundamentally different methods in succession,-nay, methods incompatible with each other, when employed' in the same field. This may indicate that the true method of Theism has not been, as yet, ascertained at all, or at least not distinctly enough to be held with sufficient steadiness. And this may be the secret of what failure there has been in attaining a true speculative doctrine. But if so, then there is a most notable current of thought and progress in the present day, that at once holds out hopeful anticipations as to coming progress in the knowledge of this high subject. It is the method of knowledge that may be said to be the characteristic object of pursuit to the thinkers of the past generation and the present. There is a deeper and broader logic than the formal science of consistency between assumptions and inferences,-between the starting-points of knowledge and its further advances. There is the logic that deals, on the one hand, with those primary constituents and conditions of all knowledge, and, on the other hand, with those laws regulative of the processes of knowing, our observance of which guarantees the truth and certainty of science. It is the mastery of this logic or method of knowledge that constitutes perhaps the most energetic attempt of modern philosophical thought. Taking up afresh the line which had been held in some firm hands, both in antiquity and in *Theism. The Baird Lecture for 1876. By Robert Flint, D.D., LL.D. Blackwood & Sons. 1877.

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