The President's Address. 293 



But they are nevertheless defective in their constitution, 

 limited in their operation, and incapable, from their very 

 nature, of developing and directing and rewarding the indi- 

 genous talent of the country. They are simply subscription 

 societies, which pay for the publication of their own transac- 

 tions, and adjudicate medals entrusted to them by the bene- 

 ficence of others. They are not bound to the exercise of any 

 x)ther function, and they are under no obligation to do the 

 scientific work of the State, or to promote any of those 

 liational objects which are entrusted to the organized insti- 

 tutions of other lands. Their President and Council are 

 necessarily resident in London ; and the talent and genius 

 t)f the provinces are excluded from their administration. 

 From this remark we must except the distinguished philoso- 

 phers of Cambridge and Oxford, who, from their proximity 

 to the capital, have been the brightest ornaments of our 

 metropolitan institutions, and without whose aid they never 

 could have attained their present pre-eminence. It is, 

 therefore, in the more remote parts of the empire that 

 the influence of a national institution would be more im- 

 mediately felt, and nowhere more powerfully than in this 

 its northern portion. Our English friends are, we believe, 

 iittle aware of the obstructions which oppose the progress of 

 science in Scotland. In our five Universities there is not a 

 single Fellowship to stimulate the genius and rouse the am- 

 bition of the student. The Church, the law, and the medical 

 profession hold out no rewards to the cultivators of mathema- 

 tical and physical science ; and were a youthful Newton or 

 ■Laplace to issue from any of our universities, his best friends 

 would advise him to renounce the divine gift, and to seek in 

 professional toil the well-earned competency which can alone 

 secure him a just position in the social scale, and an enviable 

 felicity in the domestic circle. Did this truth require any 

 evidence in its support, we find it in the notorious fact, that 

 our colleges cannot furnish Professors to fill their own im- 

 portant offices ; and the time is not distant when all our 

 tjhairs in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and even Natural 

 History, will be occupied by Professors educated in the 

 English Universities. But were a Royal Academy or In- 



