ABSTRACT

Cambridge recognised that professors of the experimental sciences needed help in preparing lecture demonstrations, even when there was no provision for ‘hands-on’ experimental work by the students themselves. This need led to a report to the Senate from the Museums and Lecture-Rooms Syndicate of 11 November 1875 in which they proposed an assistant at £100 a year for the newly appointed Jacksonian Professor. 1 They recommended that ‘such assistant to be at all times under the order of the Jacksonian Professor, and his appointment and removal to be made in accordance with the powers of the Syndicate’. This recommendation was accepted and written into the Ordinances, with the proviso ‘that the Syndicate have the power both of appointing and removing the assistants and servants of the museums and lecture-rooms, but not without the concurrence of a majority of the whole Syndicate’. In an account in his Pamphlet 1 of the subsequent row over the employment of his second assistant Dewar attached a footnote to this phrase noting that the University Calendar had a different account of the conditions, saying that ‘the appointment is made by the Professor with the consent of the Vice-Chancellor, and the person so appointed is removable in like manner’. These contradictions were to cause problems later.