From some incidental causes, a slight tinge of the desperado habits, indicated by such restrictions, lingered around the Scottish universities, and perhaps was most loth to depart from that northernmost institution to which the prohibitions specially applied. The main cause of their continuance may be attributed to the exigencies of the anatomical classes which gradually attached themselves to the schools of medicine. In obtaining subjects there was a perpetual contest with unmitigable prejudices; and as in the smaller university towns there were few or no people who followed systematically the trade of the resurrectionist, the students had to help themselves. It needed but the very fact of their having an occasional “subject” in the dissecting-room to expose them to an odious reputation, which no argument about the blessed results of the healing art, and the necessity of studying it in the structure of the human frame, could in the slightest degree mitigate. The feud thus caused was of a kind which widened as the progress of scientific acquirement enlarged the study of anatomy; and it seemed as if a permanent and deadly hostility against the progress of an essential science were daily deepening and widening, until public wrath, concentrated and accumulated, might be expected at last to burst on the devoted pursuit, and annihilate it. Though the students of anatomy were generally among those who had passed through the ordinary curriculum of studies, and no longer wore the distinguishing scarlet robe, yet their younger brethren were, not entirely without cause, mixed up in their misdeeds. Horrible stories of their waylaying children, and of their clapping plasters on the mouths of grown men met in lonely byways, which stopped the breath, and instantaneously extinguished life, were greedily believed, and founded tales capable of superseding _Bluebeard_ and _The One-handed Monk_ at the winter chimney-corner. Young lads in their early blushing scarlet were sometimes savagely assaulted, as if the poor innocents were ghouls in search of the horrible prey peculiar to their order. The public frenzy reached its climax on the revelation of the crimes of Burke and Hare. It almost as suddenly collapsed after the passing of the Anatomy Act, which removed from dissection that odium which previous legislation had factitiously imparted to it as part of the punishment of murder, and accompanied the change with special facilities for the obtainment of subjects. Hence more than twenty years have passed since the habits of our students were tainted by this incidental peculiarity, and its social effect must now be matter of tradition.