INAUGURAL ADORE8B. 23 



the United Kingdom. Now there is not a manufacturing 

 town whicli has not its well equipped College, chiefly for 

 science and art, though also for general culture — which 

 should lie at the basis of all instruction. Our technical 

 schools for working men are also growing with great rapidity; 

 and some of our Polytechnics, like tiiat in Regent-street, 

 London, have actually six or seven thousand working men 

 studying science and art, so that they may carry on their 

 work with that dignity and intelligence which is the 

 characteristic of modern intellectual competition in industry. 

 The farmers have been the last among our producers to 

 understand the need of this change ; but even they are 

 aroused, and agricultural schools are rapidly arising through- 

 out the country. It is a melancholy thing to see farm 

 labourers ploughing, manuring, and reaping without the 

 faintest scientific knowledge to illumine their empirical 

 experience. They know that the crops grown will feed the 

 labourers ; but ask them what feeds their crops, and they are 

 generally in crass ignorance. They are content to know 

 that the soil, " muck," and rain are necessary. But. ask them 

 how is it that the tree stretches out its arms to heaven to 

 pray for food, and by what wonderful dispensation the trans- 

 parent air builds up the body of the ti-ee, and how the roots, 

 like foragers, push their way into the soil and secure certain 

 necessary ingredients for the crop, and how it is that manure 

 furnishes what is lacking, and the eye of the bucolic becomes 

 like the lack-lustre eye of an ox — content to survey only his 

 immediate surroundings. All this is changing in England 

 since you left for Tasmania ; and there is a far greater demand 

 for agricultural teachers than we can supply, although our 

 Technical Association has foreseen that the demand was 

 coming. 



Australia is not a country which has had either the benefits 

 or defects of ages of empirical experience. You have become 

 a nation at the time when the older countries had discovered 

 that long experience no longer sufficed, but that science must 

 go hand in hand with practice in the pursuit of industrial 

 wealth. The abundance of natural resources and vast terri- 

 torial possessions retarded the intellectual growth of the 

 United States, which already finds the need of science in all 

 its industrial undertakings ; and, with its characteristic energy, 

 is developing its scientific education and its institutions for the 

 promotion of scientific discovery. 



Everything which ]>roraotes human culture developes 



