Pièce 45 - James David Forbes to William Whewell

4 pp

Edinburgh - JDF again congratulates WW on being made Master of Trinity College [see JDF to WW, 31 Oct. 1841]. The decline of university education in Scotland is not a local or temporary cause, but a general one: 'I apprehend that it depends upon the struggle for education of families which drives so many to emigrate - and the only kind of education which is at a premium is that which fits men for Australia or for Canada. In England on the other hand where university education never have anything like the proportion which it did with us to the wealth or even the population of the country, these causes do not act appreciably on the old universities, tho' they are even more felt than with us in the London medical schools'. JDF has never had a more fruitful summer than the one he just spent viewing glaciers [see JDF to WW, 22 Sept. 1841]: 'People who visit a glacier and return to the civilized world at night think they get a good idea of it, but it is only a protracted residence amongst these icy solitude which imbues one truly with their spirit and enables one to reason confidently concerning things so widely removed from common experience...in truth the whole theory of the mechanism and economy of a glacier is yet in its infancy'. JDF finds plenty of arguments against current theories of glacier motion, although 'the geological speculations of Charpentier [Jean de Charpentier] followed up by Agassiz [Louis Agassiz] appear to admit of more definite treatment'.