The direction of these is chiefly to show how thoroughly these remote institutions partook in the great system of the European universities, and how many of its vestiges they still retain. The forms, the nomenclature, and the usages of the middle ages are still preserved, though some of them have naturally changed their character with the shifting of the times. Each university has still its chancellor, and sometimes a high State dignitary accepts of the office. It was of old a very peculiar one, for it was the link which allied the semi-republican institutions of the universities to the hierarchy of St Peter. The bishop was almost invariably the chancellor, unless the university were subordinated to some great monastic institution, when its head was the chancellor—as in Paris the Prior of St Genevieve exercised the high office. In the Scottish universities the usual Continental arrangement seems to have been adopted prior to the Reformation—as a matter of course, the bishop was the chancellor. But while the institution was thus connected through a high dignitary with the Romish hierarchy, it possessed, as a great literary community with peculiar privileges, its own great officer electively chosen for the preservation of those privileges. It had its rector, who, like the chief magistrate of a municipal corporation, but infinitely above him in the more illustrious character of the functions for which his constituents were incorporated, stood forth as the head of his republic, and its protector from the invasions either of the subtle churchmen or the grasping barons. The rector, indeed, was the concentration of that peculiar commonwealth which the constitution of the ancient university prescribed. Sir William Hamilton has shown pretty clearly that, in its original acceptation, the word Universitas was applied, not to the comprehensiveness of the studies, but to that of the local and personal expansion of the institution. The university despised the bounds of provinces, and even nations, and was a place where ardent minds from all parts of the world met to study together, and impart to each other the influence of collective intellect working in combination and competition. The constitution of the rectorship was calculated to provide for the protection of this universality, for the election was managed by the procurators or proctors of the nations or local bodies into which the students were divided, generally for the purpose of neutralising the naturally superior influence of the home students, and keeping up the cosmopolitan character imparted to the system by its enlightened founders. Hence in Paris the nations were France, Picardy, and England, afterwards changed to Germany, in which Scotland was included. Glasgow is still divided into four nations: the Natio Glottiana, or Clydesdale, taken from the name given to the river by Tacitus. In the Natio Laudoniana were originally included the rest of