From a small city college in the sixteenth century the University of Edinburgh grew to be one of the world's greatest centres of scholarship, research and learning. Its history is told here by three of its leading historians with wit, verve and style. Copiously illustrated in colour and black and white, this is a book for everyone concerned with the university or the city of Edinburgh to read and enjoy. The authors consider the impacts of Reformation, Union with England, Enlightenment, and scientific and industrial revolutions. They show the university rising to the challenge of competition from Europe, describe the great periods of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and chart the university's building from Old College to George Square. They explore its tense relationship with the city, explore the histories of student outrage and unrest, recall the days when blasphemy could be punished by death, and reveal that the university's department of anatomy once supported a thriving trade in body-snatching. Upheaval and crisis, triumph and achievement succeed each other by turns in a story that is entertaining, intriguing and surprising - and always interesting.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1862.

Excerpt from Address to the Students of the University of Edinburgh: Delivered on 28th October, 1884 But what I want now to bring out and emphasise is, that the general body of the students of this University appeared at the Festival, and on other occasions during the year, no longer as a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, but in some respects as an organic body - self-organised; no longer inarticulate, but provided with the means of constitutionally expressing its ideas and its wants, and exhibiting, as M. Rivier observed, considerable savm'r aire, or practical ability. This is a most remarkable innovation. I hail it as the most important achievement of this year - as the first striking feature of the new epoch which we are now inaugurating. I look upon your new constitution, if I may call it so, as destined to have happy results, and to change in many respects the character of student-life not only here, but in the other Universities of Scotland, who will certainly copy what has been done and will be done here. When I speak of student-life, I must not forget that one of the German news papers pronounced that there was no student-life at Edinburgh. Why, it said. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.