When I think of my own student life, and of the impression which a man like Johannes Müller, the physiologist, made upon us, I must place a very high value upon this latter point. Anyone who has once come in contact with one or more men of the first rank must have had his whole mental standard altered for the rest of his life. Such intercourse is, moreover, the most interesting that life can offer. You, my younger friends, have received in this freedom of the German students a costly and valuable inheritance of preceding generations. Keep it--and hand it on to coming races, purified and ennobled if possible. You have to maintain it, by each, in his place, taking care that the body of German students is worthy of the confidence which has hitherto accorded such a measure of freedom. But freedom necessarily implies responsibility. It is as injurious a present for weak, as it is valuable for strong characters. Do not wonder if parents and statesmen sometimes urge that a more rigid system of supervision and control, like that of the English, shall be introduced even among us. There is no doubt that, by such a system, many a one would be saved who is ruined by freedom. But the State and the Nation is best served by those who can bear freedom, and have shown that they know how to work and to struggle, from their own force and insight and from their own interest in science. My having previously dwelt on the influence of mental intercourse with distinguished men, leads me to discuss another point in which German Universities are distinguished from the English and French ones. It is that we start with the object of having instruction given, if possible, only by teachers who have proved their own power of advancing science. This also is a point in respect to which the English and French often express their surprise. They lay more weight than the Germans on what is called the ‘talent for teaching’--that is, the power of explaining the subjects of instruction in a well-arranged and clear manner, and, if possible, with eloquence, and so as to entertain and to fix the attention. Lectures of eloquent orators at the Collège de France, Jardin des Plantes, as well as in Oxford and Cambridge, are often the centres of the elegant and the educated world. In Germany we are not only indifferent to, but even distrustful of, oratorical ornament, and often enough are more negligent than we should be of the outer forms of the lecture. There can be no doubt that a good lecture can be followed with far less exertion than a bad one; that the matter of the first can be more certainly and completely apprehended; that a well-arranged explanation, which develops the salient points and the divisions of the subject, and which brings it, as it were, almost intuitively before us, can impart more information in the same time than one which has the opposite qualities. I am by no means prepared to defend what is, frequently, our too great contempt for form in speech and in writing.