ΧΙ REPORT—1850. 
—all look up to the National Institute as a mighty obelisk erected to science, 
to be respected, and loved, and defended by all. We have seen it standing, 
unshaken and active, amid all the revolutions and convulsions which linge 
so long agitated that noble but distracted country—a common centre of 
affection, to which antagonist opinions, and rival interests, and dissevered 
hearts, have peacefully converged. It thus becomes an institution of order, 
calculated to send back to its contending friends a message of union and 
peace, and to replace in stable equilibrium the tottering institutions of the 
state. 
Tt was, doubtless, with views like vhese that the great Colbert established 
the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and that the powerful and sagacious 
monarchs on the Continent of Europe have imitated his example. They 
have established in their respective capitals similar institutions—they have 
sustained them with liberal endowments—they have conferred rank and 
honours on their more eminent members; and there are now in this assem- 
bly distinguished foreigners who have well earned the rewards and distine- 
tions they have received. It i is, therefore, Gentlemen, no extravagant opinion, 
that institutions which have thus thriven in other countries should thrive in 
ours—that insulated societies, which elsewhere flourish in combination, 
should, when confined, flourish among us—and that men, ordained by the 
state to the undivided functions of science, should do more and better work 
than those who snatch an hour or two from their daily toil, or from their 
nightly rest. 
In a great nation like ours, where the higher interests and objects of the 
state are necessarily organized, it is a singular anomaly that the intellectual 
interests of the country “should, in a great measure, be left to voluntary sup- 
port and individual zeal—an anomaly, that could have arisen only from 
the ignorance or supineness of ever-changing administrations, and from the 
intelligence and liberality of a commercial ‘people—an anomaly, too, that 
could have been continued only by the excellence of the institutions they 
had founded. In the history of no civilized people can we find private 
establishments so generously fostered, so energetically conducted, and so suc- 
cessful in their objects, as the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh, and 
Dublin, and the Astronomical, Geological, Zoological, and Linnzean Societies 
of the metropolis. They are institutions that do honour to the nation, and 
they will ever be gratefully remembered in the history of science. 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 indigenous talent of the country. They are simply subscription socie- 
ties, which pay for the publication of their own Transactions, and adjudicate 
medals entrusted to them by the beneficence of others. They are not bound 
to the exercise of any other function, and they are under no obligation to 
do the scientific work of the state, or to promote any of those national ob- 
jects which are entrusted to the organized institutions of other lands. 
Their President and Council are necessarily resident in London; and the 
talent and genius of the provinces are excluded from their administration. 
From this remark we must except the distinguished philosophers of Cam- 
bridge 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. 
Tei is, therefore, in the more remote parts of the empire that the influence 
of a national institution would be more immediately felt, and nowhere more 
powerfully than in this its northern portion. Our English friends are, we 
