With all these and other indications of poverty, there is something to our eyes extremely interesting in the Scottish universities, as relics preserved through all changes in dynasties, constitutions, and ecclesiastical polities, through poverty, neglect, and enmity, of the original characteristics of the university system, as it existed in all its grandeur of design in the middle ages. A collection of remarkable papers, now before us, opens up and presents, in valuable and full light, the progress of a portion of our Scottish universities. They consist of two works of that class commonly called “Club Books.” The one is a collection of records and other documents connected with the University of Glasgow, printed under the auspices of the Maitland Club; the other a “Fasti Aberdonenses,” appropriately collected by that northern association which, in honour of the Cavalier annalist of “The Troubles,” is called the “Spalding Club.” Both works are edited with that peculiar archæological strictness which has been applied to this class of documents, through the special skill of Mr Cosmo Innes. They are both edited by him, with some partial aid, in the case of the Glasgow documents, from his ablest coadjutor in Scottish archæology, Mr Joseph Robertson. These volumes form a very apt supplement to that collection of ecclesiastical records which, arranged and printed under the same able management, are an honour to our country. With the exception of their curious and agreeable prefaces, neither the chartularies nor the volumes before us profess to be readable books. They are collections of records, and must have all the substantial dryness of records. But then they contain in themselves the materials of the social and incidental history of the classes of persons to which they refer, and contain imbedded within them the materials of instruction, both valuable and curious. With some labour we have driven shafts through their strata, and we may have occasion to lay before our readers a few of the specimens we have excavated—confining ourselves, in the mean time, to the characteristics developed by the collection of documents.