t perhaps of all others demanding
gentleness and caution. No man could more earnestly have desired the
changes lately introduced into the system of the University of Oxford
than I did myself: no man can be more deeply sensible than I of grievous
failures in the practical working even of the present system: but I
believe that these failures may be almost without exception traced to
one source, the want of evangelical, and the excess of rubrical religion
among the tutors; together with such rustinesses and stiffnesses as
necessarily attend the continual operation of any intellectual machine.
The fault is, at any rate, far less in the system than in the
imperfection of its administration; and had it been otherwise, the terms
in which Mr. Fergusson speaks of it are hardly decorous in one who can
but be imperfectly acquainted with its working. They are sufficiently
answered by the structure of the essay in which they occur; for if the
high powers of mind which its author possesses had been subjected to the
discipline of the schools, he could not have wasted his time on the
development of a system which their simplest formulae of logic would have
shown him to be untenable.

Mr. Fergusson will, however, find it easier to overthrow his system than
to replace it. Every man of science knows the difficulty of arranging a
_reasonable_ system of classification, in any subject, by any one group
of characters; and that the best classifications are, in many of their
branches, convenient rather than reasonable: so that, to any person who
is really master of his subject, many different modes of classification
will occur at different times; one of which he will use rather than
another, according to the point which he has to investigate. I need only
instance the three arrangements of minerals, by their external
characters, and their positive or negative bases, of which the first is
the most useful, the second the most natural, the third the most simple;
and all in several ways unsatisfactory.

But when the subject becomes one which no single mind can grasp, and
which embraces the whole range of human occupation and enquiry, the
difficulties become as great, and the methods as various, as the uses to
which the classification might be put; and Mr. Fergusson has entirely
forgotten to inform us what is the object to which his arrangements are
addressed. For observe: there is one kind of arrangement which is based
on the rational connection of