48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The wealthy Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are gradually 

 constructing laboratories for science. The merchant princes of Man- 

 chester have equipped their new Victoria University with similar labo- 

 ratories. Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have also done so, 

 partly at the cost of Government and largely by private subscriptions. 

 The poorer Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews are still ineffi- 

 ciently provided with the modern appliances for teaching science. 



London has one small Government college and two chartered col- 

 leges, but is wholly destitute of a teaching university. It would excite 

 great astonishment at the Treasury if we were to make the modest 

 request that the great metropolis, with a population of four million, 

 should be put into as efficient academical position as the town of 

 Strasburg, with 104,000 inhabitants, by receiving, as that town does, 

 £43,000 annually for academic instruction and £700,000 for university 

 buildings. Still, the amazing anomaly that London has no teaching 

 university must ere long cease. 



It is a comforting fact that, in spite of the indifference of Parlia- 

 ment, the large towns of the kingdom are showing their sense of the 

 need of higher education. Manchester has already its university. 

 Nottingham, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bristol have colleges more or less 

 complete. Liverpool converts a disused lunatic asylum into a college 

 for sane people. Cardiff rents an infirmary for a collegiate building. 

 Dundee, by private benefaction, rears a Baxter College with larger 

 ambitions. All these are healthy signs that the public are determined 

 to have advanced science-teaching, but the resources of the institutions 

 are altogether inadequate to the end in view. Even in the few cases 

 where the laboratories are efficient for teaching purposes, they are in- 

 efficient as laboratories for research. Under these circumstances the 

 Royal Commission on Science advocates special Government labora- 

 tories for research. Such laboratories, supported by public money, 

 are as legitimate subjects for expenditure as galleries for pictures or 

 sculpture ; but I think that they would not be successful, and would 

 injure science if they failed. It would be safer in the mean time if 

 the state assisted universities or well-established colleges to found 

 laboratories of research under their own care. Even such a proposal 

 shocks our Chancellor of the Exchequer, who tells us that this country 

 is burdened with public debt, and has ironclads to build and arsenals 

 to provide. Nevertheless our wealth is proportionally much greater 

 than that of foreign states which are competing with so much vigor 

 in the promotion of higher education. They deem such expenditure 

 to be true economy, and do not allow their huge standing armies to be 

 an apology for keeping their people backward in the march of knowl- 

 edge. France, which in the last ten years has been spending a million 

 annually on university education, had a war indemnity to pay, and com- 

 petes successfully with this country in ironclads. Either all foreign 

 states are strangely deceived in their belief that the competition of 



