CULLEN. 211 their prospects. With the most assiduous he gra- dually formed an intimacy, which often proved highly beneficial to their private interests. His ex- cellent library was at all times open to their use ; he kept up a correspondence with them on their departure from the university, and was often instru- mental in establishing them in desirable situations. His benevolent mind doubtless often looked back on the struggles of his early days, and sympathy with those who had to encounter similar privations often opened his purse to straitened merit. To seek out the obscure, to invite the humble, was his parti- cular pleasure ; he behaved to such rather as if he courted their society, than as if they could be bet- tered by his patronage. He often found out some polite excuse for refusing to take payment for his lectures, and steadily refused to accept a fee from any student ; a custom which, we believe, has be- come naturalized at Edinburgh from the date of Cullen. Hoffman and Baghvi had restored to the solids that direct and essential influence upon the healthy and morbid states of the system which the humoral pathologists had assigned to the fluids. They had endeavoured to demonstrate that the changes which occur in the condition of the fluids are merely the consequences and necessary effects of the changes which the solids undergo. The operations of life, in short, and all its revolutions, were thus accomphshed in the solid parts of the system, which Hoffmann designated, in consonance with his doctrine, as the Solidum Vivens. The Solidists are distin- guished from the old Methodic sect, in acknow- ledging, with Hippocrates, the existence of a vital p2
