TEE HALO OF A HUNDRED YEARS 393 



contemporary recognition ; of Dalton, who^ working as a private teacher 

 at Manchester, was first appreciated in the University of Glasgow; of 

 George Green, the self-taught IsTottingham genius, who anticipated 

 Gauss in elaborating the general mathematical theory of potential func- 

 tion, and who was also made known to European science by my alma 

 mater; of Boole, who, though the founder of the science of invariants, 

 taught in "venture" schools at Doncaster and Lincoln, and never 

 climbed higher than the professorship of mathematics at an incon- 

 spicuous Irish college ;^^ of Faraday and Joule, whose pertinacious, 

 unaided labors were also rated first at their real worth in the University 

 of Glasgow; of the Yorkshire shepherd, Dawson, who made Senior 

 AVranglers at Sedbergh in the last years of the eighteenth century. All 

 these men — and I might name others, like the classical succession of 

 English philosophers — were personalities, not ranking officers in a 

 national syndicate of scientific feudalism. Darwin stood latest in their 

 wonderful, and characteristically English, line. The Englishman's 

 passion for independence, his desire for the free play of idiosyncrasy, 

 may account for this. More powerful, in my judgment, is the fact 

 that the pursuit of science had not become a profession, and with the 

 astonishing consequences noted so caustically b)'' Brewster, in 1830. 



Tlie great inventions and discoveries which have been made in England 

 during the last century have been made without the precincts of our univer- 

 sities. In proof of this we have only to recall the labours of Bradley, Dollond, 

 Priestley, Cavendish, Maskelyne, Rumford, Watt, Wollaston, Young, Davy 

 and Chenevix; and among the living to mention the names of Dalton, Ivory, 

 Brown, Hatchett, Pond, Hersehel, Babbage, Henry, Barlow, South, Faraday, 

 Murdoch and Christie; nor need we have any hesitation in adding that within 

 the last fifteen years not a single discovery or invention of prominent interest 

 has been made in our colleges, and that there is not one man in all the eight 

 universities of Great Britain who is at present known to be engaged in any 

 train of original research." 



(A research club takes due note, I hope !) Science lay in far deeper 

 debt to the unusual endowment of individuals than to the patronage of 

 academies, or the fostering stimulus of universities, true to the highest 

 trust of education. In this connection, then, note finally that Darwin's 

 character furnished an ideal instrument for the continuation of this 

 process, more Anglicano. 



On the intellectual side, Darwin's character presented a combination, 

 unique in modern times at least, of extensive knowledge, profound 

 sagacity and deliberative caution. His mastery over detail simply over- 

 whelms one. His sense for relationship and consequent power to detect 

 a single principle, no matter how confusing the multiplied phenomena 



"Queen's College, Cork. 



^Quarterly Review, Vol. XLIII., p. 327. This article led to the founda- 

 tion of the British Association. Cf. " The English Utilitarians," Leslie Stephen, 

 Vol. I., pp. 47 f., 112. 



