tiring zeal. In a sketch written soon after his death, we are told that "the twelve years of his régime have been marked by an extraordinary rapidity of development in various directions. The attendance of students has greatly increased, so that they now number about five hundred in the faculty of arts alone. The teaching medical faculty has been restored to the university, and is now in a highly prosperous condition. A foundation for a law faculty has been laid. The university has been brought into more effective and beneficial relation to the secondary schools, by the establishment of a co-operative supervision over their leaving examinations. During the past six years women have been permitted to attend lectures in the university and University College, their number being now about one fifth of the whole attendance, and the ratio rapidly increasing. Several additional institutions have been taken into affiliation with the university, which has thus been strengthened with the whole community, as well as with many special and powerful interests."
As originally established, the University of Toronto and University College were to a certain extent distinct institutions. The university was simply an examining and degree-conferring corporation, while University College was a teaching institution, with a faculty of arts. By a recent change, part of the teaching function, comprising all the work in science, philosophy, and history, has been transferred to the university; and as a result, the President of the College became actually, as he had been in common parlance, the President of the University.
For the interests of science and literature it was probably fortunate that Prof. Wilson's accession to the college presidency, with the consequent great increase in his scholastic duties, did not occur at an earlier day. During the twenty-seven years which elapsed between his arrival in Toronto and this accession, he had leisure to pursue his studies in various directions. In 1862 appeared his most important work, entitled Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World. This work attracted much attention on both continents, and gave a new direction, particularly in Germany, to anthropological inquiry. A second edition appeared in 1865, still in one volume. The continuing demand and the growth of scientific knowledge called for a new and revised issue, with many additions, which appeared in 1875, in two large and finely illustrated volumes.
The author's literary taste and judgment were happily shown in his admirable book, Chatterton: a Biographical Study, which appeared in 1869. It was a thoroughly successful effort to rehabilitate the moral character of the "marvelous boy," as well as to display the real nature and extent of his surprising intellectual
