THERE have lately appeared in NATURE suggestive summaries of addresses by Sir H. Roscoe, Dr. D. J. Hill and Prof. Ramsay on, respectively, “The Work of the London University,” “The Extension of Knowledge” and “The Functions of a University,” together with various other papers of an educational character. And to these I would beg permission to add some remarks on the importance of the recognition and endowment, in this country also, of history as a science. Three things are required to make of a body of knowledge a science (1) verifiability of statements; (2) sufficient length and breadth of survey to make possible the discovery of laws, or verifiable generalisations; and (3) the actual discovery, or an approximation to the discovery, of one or more laws of the facts constituting the body of knowledge considered. But history, as it is commonly studied and taught in British Universities, embraces such brief periods that it can, at best, be characterised only by the most elementary of these three requirements. In geology we have had a science of earth's history since the discovery of the law of the succession of strata. In anthropology we have not, as yet, a science of man's history, seeing that the law of the succession of civilisations has not yet been discovered, or has not, at least, yet been adequately verified. The first object, however, of this letter is briefly to point out that, though the science of man's history would be the most complex of the sciences of evolution, yet the immensely varied results of the researches of the last half, and particularly of the last quarter, of the nineteenth century do bring within the scope of reasonable aims the discovery and verification of general laws of history, with all the incalculable consequences which would therefrom follow in the power given to interpret the past, to guide the present and to forecast the future. And the further object of this letter is to urge that, endowed as the study of history as a science is in all the greater Universities, both of Europe and of America, it should at length he adequately endowed also in British Universities, and more especially in those of Scotland, now so munificently endowed, and whose sons, since Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations,” David Hume, in his “Natural History of Religion,” and John Millar, in his “Origin of Ranks,” have been among the foremost workers and discoverers in this Scientia Scientiarum.