SKETCH OF WILLIAM 3IATTIEU WILLIAMS. 549 



better possibilities. After his return from the Continent he was 

 elected a member of the Committee of Management of the London 

 Mechanics' Institution. He opened rooms for carrying on com- 

 mercially the business of an electrician, an electrical instrument 

 maker, and electrotyper, intending at the same time to deliver 

 lectures on science and travel. But as his friend Mr, John An- 

 gell remarks, in a memoir prefixed to his Vindication of Phrenol- 

 ogy, " his enthusiastic love of science and general research was 

 destined to become a foe to the habits and forms of attention re- 

 quired in successful commercial business. Many a time friends 

 calling on him late in the evening found him so thoroughly ab- 

 sorbed in pursuing the theory of some practical problem he had 

 succeeded in working out that he had forgotten, meantime, that 

 he had taken neither food nor refreshment since his morning 

 breakfast." He was frequently called on to lecture at institu- 

 tions at a distance, when he would be absent for days at a time, 

 chiefly on subjects connected with his European tour, among 

 which a favorite course with him was one of six lectures on Switz- 

 erland, its social and historical aspects, jphysical geography, 

 geology, and glacier formations. 



About the year 1846 Mr. "William Ellis made an offer of one 

 thousand pounds sterling toward establishing a school, to be 

 called the Birkbeck School, on the premises of the London Me- 

 chanics' Institution, in which, besides the principles of the natural 

 sciences, the principles of social well-being, or of social and polit- 

 ical economy, should be regularly taught. The Committee of 

 Management of the institution were unfavorable to this plan, and 

 ignored it in their report ; whereupon a bitter controversy ensued, 

 in which Mr. Williams was active in opposing the course of the 

 committee and insisting on giving a hearing to Mr. Ellis's propo- 

 sition. Finally, the offer was accepted over the heads of the man- 

 aging committee, the project was put under the care of a special 

 committee, and the first Birkbeck School was established July 17, 

 1848, with Mr. John Riintze as head master. Many years later 

 Mr. Williams met one of his strongest opponents in that contro- 

 versy, who confessed to him : " We all thought you and your 

 party were wrong ; now I know that your party was right and 

 we were wrong." 



The Birkbeck Institution was successful from the first, and 

 attracted the attention of George Combe, a man distinguished for 

 his advocacy of schemes for bettering the condition of man, and 

 who had become acquainted with Mr. Williams while he was 

 studying in Edinburgh. He determined, with the aid of money 

 which Mr. Ellis should furnish, to establish a similar secular 

 school in Edinburgh, in which phrenology should be taught in 

 addition to the other branches. The problem of finding a com- 



