Dr. McCosh, also, adopts rather too depreciatory a tone in speaking of our countrymen, especially considering that he has but just come among us, and knows us at best only imperfectly. We own it was no striking indication of American intelligence and judgment the importation of him to preside over one of the best Protestant American institutions of learning and science; but men often loom up larger at a distance than they are when seen close by, and there is no country in which bubble reputations from abroad more speedily collapse than our own. The doctor will find, when he has lived longer among us, and becomes better acquainted with us, that if England is nearer Germany, German speculations are known to Americans and appreciated by them at least as soon as they are by Englishmen or Scotsmen. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, were known to American scholars before there was much knowledge of them in England or Scotland. The English and Scotch are now just becoming acquainted with and are carried away by theories and speculations in philosophy which had been examined here, and exploded more than thirty years ago by Americans. The doctor underrates the scholarship and intelligence even of his American Presbyterian friends, and there are scholars, men of thought, of science, general intelligence, in the country many degrees above Presbyterians, respectable as they are. Presbyterians are not by any means the whole American people, nor the most advanced portion of them. They are really behind the Congregationalists, to say nothing of “the ignorant and superstitious” Catholics, whose scholars are in science and learning, philosophy, theology, especially in the history of the church, it is no boast to say, superior to either, and know and understand better the movements of the age, intellectual, moral, social, and political theories, crotchets, and tendencies of the present, than any other class of American citizens. It takes more than a Dr. McCosh, although for a time a professor in Belfast, Ireland, to teach them more than they already know.