This article considers the influence of legal education based on the Dutch tradition of legal humanism on a Scottish student of the late seventeenth-century. An annotated textbook retained by Charles Binning contains notes from his studies with the Utrecht professor Cornelis van Eck and provides evidence for Van Eck’s teaching practices. Their education abroad equipped Scottish legal students for the professional, intellectual and cultural lives they would lead when they returned home. Exposure to the ideas contained in the books they studied and their relationships with the Continental learned gave Scottish scholars admission into the international Republic of Letters. This had significance for the development of the Scottish Enlightenment.


Van Goens was hoogleraar in de oudheden, de Griekse taal, de welsprekendheid en de vaderlandse geschiedenis te Utrecht (1766-1776), lid van de vroedschap te Utrecht (1776-1783) en als vurig Orangist zonder beroep en later als letterkundige in het buitenland.

Nicolaas Cornelis de Fremery (1770-1844) was one of the early palaeontologists in The Netherlands. After his studies in Leiden he was appointed professor in medicine, pharmacy, chemistry and natural history at the university of Utrecht. De Fremery published in his later years three articles on Dutch fossil mammals. In his first publication on a fossil skull of Bos primigenius, found in 1825 at Eembrugge, he clearly points out his ideas on geology. De Fremery appears to be influenced by the catastrofism theory of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). De Fremery, however, added some remarkable new views to this widespread theory. The aim of this article is to analyse his work on the palaeozoology and the geology of The Netherlands. Comparisons with some foreign contemporaries are made.