1869,] Practical Scientific Research. 45 



necessary by our enlightened German neighbours for the encou- 

 ragement of chemical research, and the sole attemj^ts that have been 

 made by ourselves in the same direction, namely, the Laboratory of 

 the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, and perhaps the Koyal 

 College of Chemistry, which is almost a national establishment. 



It is pretty generally understood that our colonial dependencies 

 for the most part consider that they are yet too young to have 

 much to do with the cares of providing means for the encourage- 

 ment or prosecution of science. There is a constant tendency in 

 their free-and-easy life to scatter and spread rather than to concen- 

 trate. So long as there are millions of acres of unoccupied wastes 

 just beyond the outposts of the last appropriated settlements, asking 

 men to come and possess them, our colonists hold that it is not 

 necessary for them to trouble themselves about the progress of 

 science. This is so much the case, that the great leviathan proto- 

 type of colonization, the Transatlantic Eepublic, even now distinctly 

 avows that its own proper functions are to diffuse, rather than to 

 create; to send the wave of civilization onward into the wilder- 

 ness, rather than to increase its depth or force. If this be so, it is 

 a correlative consequence of the position that lands otherwise 

 circumstanced, as is the case with the British Isles, where there 

 is a rapidly increasing population but a rigidly hmited territory 

 and no room for overflow, must especially take to themselves the 

 work of creation, and aim at standing in the van in that particular 

 mode of developing and applying power to which small islands are 

 adapted by the actual exigencies of theu^ existence. For this rea- 

 son alone " Great Britain," of all the nations of the earth, ought 

 to be the most munificent and cordial patron of science in any and 

 in every form, as the one beneficent genius to whom it has owed so 

 much of its "greatness" and to whom alone it can look for the 

 preservation of its greatness on its sea-girt throne in time to come. 

 Yet in the face of this obvious consideration there arises the re- 

 markable circumstance, that at the present time Great Britain has 

 not a single first-class telescope at work with adequate optical power 

 for the refined investigations that are now pressing upon the notice 

 of the astronomer, while one of her colonial dependencies in the 

 opposite hemisphere has just completed an instrument of this class 

 at large public outlay. In all probability results wiU be secured in 

 the spectroscopic analysis of the light of faint stars that fail to show 

 spectral signs to smaller instruments, through this enhghtened act 

 of the Melbourne Government, which will give further jooint to the 

 argument dow on hand. 



It is an important peculiarity of science, viewed as a branch 

 of human pursuit and industry, that there is literally no limit to 

 either the objects of investigation or the necessity for continuous 

 inquiry. Phenomena of apparently the most trivial character 



