Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/508

504 thing is that, prior to and during these years, or, to be quite exact, between 1774 and 1828, Britain had contributed at least a dozen discoveries of the first magnitude, and as many more of scarcely less importance. As you all know for what each stands, I need only mention Priestley, Black, Landen, Davy, Benjamin Thompson, Cavendish, Herschel, Nicholson and Carlisle, Dalton, Young, Wollaston, Ivory, Robert Brown, Charles Bell, Brewster, William Smith, Prout, Faraday, George Green and Bowan Hamilton. Still more wonderful, continental leaders were well aware of these contributions, and wont to emphasize them. In 1821, Cuvier gave most generous testimony: and Moll, of Utrecht, repelled Babbage's criticisms with no uncertain sound, remarking, "all must allow that it is an extraordinary circumstance for English character to be attacked by natives and defended by foreigners."

Although I can not comment upon the ramifications to-night, the puzzle has some obvious causes. The English universities were not scientific organs, but groups of residential colleges. The advancement of science was no primary part of their purpose, precisely as the laborious elevation of incompetents to a bare level of possible passability was no primary part of the purpose of the German universities or the French institutes. The colleges cherished their individuality fondly, because they aimed to produce a certain type of man for life—to anneal him by forming his ethos, and to fit him for the exercise of civic influence by giving him a respectable general acquaintance with the "things of the mind." In a word, the English universities did not exist to promote science or learning, any more than the continental organizations existed to provide an educational top-dressing for the sons and daughters of "the people." So, too, of pure thought. The apostolic succession of English philosophers—Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Mills, Spencer, even our contemporaries, Hodgson, Balfour, Shand, Haldane and Bertrand Russell—do not adorn the universities. Again, the peculiar position of the metropolis, its new university in the melting-pot at this moment, must be taken into account. Lacking the academic center, its scientific societies could not be organized for the advancement of discovery after the style of French and German associations. These causes, together with the distinctive arrangement of English society a century ago, tended to render the great scientific pioneers lonely figures, sitting loose to the main expressions and modes of national culture. The wails over the condition of English science are traceable as much to this severance, with its absence of constant intercourse and cooperation, as to aught else. How Priestley and Dalton and Joule, Young and Davy and Faraday were hampered by these