58 Royal Society. 



givings : continental experience was not altogether relied upon. Al- 

 though it had been very much the practice of foreign governments 

 to take an active part in encouraging the pursuit of science, and with 

 decided success, here the smallest effort in that direction was looked 

 upon by some as an experiment little harmonizing with our institu- 

 tions, our feelings, perhaps our prejudices, and only to be followed 

 by failure and disappointment. It was feared that because occasion- 

 ally there had been some difficulty in employing effectively the small 

 fund which had been bequeathed to us, that therefore there would 

 be increased difficulty in employing a larger fund ; and this no doubt 

 would have happened if there had been restrictions limiting the 

 application of the larger fund to certain specific objects, or if the 

 field of discovery had been of limited extent : the reverse however 

 was the case. Your Council were not embarrassed by any unwise 

 restrictions, and in science there is room for every one. It is one 

 of the deductions of economic science that labour creates a demand 

 for labour ; in fact, that where a community is industrious, and 

 labour accumulates and becomes capital, that there the people will be 

 fully employed : the same is true in the inductive sciences, and it 

 is true universally ; there no modifying causes interfere to diminish 

 the force, or limit the application of the great principle, and we see 

 strikingly that as facts accumulate, and facts are the capital of 

 inductive science, fresh employment is everywhere provided for 

 those who are willing to work. Take any one of the inductive 

 sciences as an example, and we at once see how this is. Talie for 

 instance chemistry, compare it as it now is with what it Avas when 

 Priestley commenced his career. The whole of the science then con- 

 sisted of an imperfect knowledge of the properties of a few of the 

 metals, of sulphur, phosphorus, and the three alkalies as they were 

 then called. There was a little known also about salts and acids, and 

 the existence of hydrogen and carbonic acid gas had recently been 

 ascertained. In a range so limited there was little room but for one 

 master mind, when Priestley discovered oxygen, and at once an open- 

 ing was made for researches into the nature of the atmosphere, of 

 water, and of combustion, of the acids and the alkalies, and ample 

 employment was provided for a host of distinguished philosophers 

 for years to come. Other important discoveries were soon made, 

 each becoming as it were a new origin of light, throwing perhaps 

 at first but feeble rays upon the objects around us, but revealing so 

 much of their strange forms as to excite curiosity, and awaken the 

 strongest passion of the human mind, — the desire to discover the 

 truth. Inorganic chemistry was then rapidly becoming a great 

 science, when the foundations of organic chemistry were laid in a 

 succession of brilliant discoveries. That was but a few years ago, 

 but there were many men then ready trained for the work, and the 

 progress was jjroportionally rapid. To take a few of the disco- 

 veries in organic chemistry, and show how each has been the germ 

 of others, as it were the first term of a diverging series, and thus 

 to exhibit the great principle at work that in science labour creates 



