Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/201

 of those branches of manufacture which have been introduced into the colony or which might be introduced with advantage—models of machinery, especially of mills, mining machines and tools. In connection with this department you might have an office for the registration of patents; and a short report might be annually published informing the public of the discovery of any new resources in the colony, the locality of each kind of mineral raw material, the patents registered, and an epitome of the chief European discoveries bearing upon colonial industries.

"I believe I could do all this better than any one else you could get, inasmuch as I have devoted more time to such matters—indeed it is I made the chief part of the recent collections for the Scotch Museum at Edinburgh, and it is the system of labelling and description carried out by me at this museum which is now being adopted in all the other technological museums. Further, if you could allocate a certain sum, say £3,000 or £4,000, I could take out a collection of models of mining machinery, windmills, flour mills, machinery for the preparation of fibres, &c., together with specimens illustrative of the processes of manufacture such as does not exist in any museum here after an expenditure of twice or thrice that sum.

"You can scarcely believe the simple questions that are sometimes demanded by persons in Melbourne, and upon the most commonplace branches of manufacture, such as soap, leather, &c. I have received at least twenty such. Now, there ought to be the means of having such questions answered on the spot—nay, more, such knowledge ought to be forced upon every one whom it concerns.

"It is not classics or paleontology (and no one has a higher appreciation of such subjects than myself) that will increase the material prosperity of an infant colony—you must have the foundations and the skeleton of the building before you can ornament it."

This was a bold and practical scheme, and if Huxley, whose gifts were not rarer than Sullivan's, had made the same proposal, he would have been received in Victoria with enthusiasm, and to me the coming of Sullivan would have been a happy stroke of fortune for the new community; but