86 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



GOVERNMENT AID TO SCIENCE. 



AMONG the questions which will occupy the attention 

 of the new Parliament, we think we may safely include, 

 in anticipation, the subject of State intervention to 

 secure the progress of physical science.* It will be 

 remembered that this subject was brought before the 

 notice of the British Association, at its recent meeting, 

 by Lieutenant-Colonel Strange, and a committee in- 

 cluding the names of Professors Sir William Thomson, 



of the sierra before Secchi, and Leverrier had also independently arrived 

 at the same conclusion as Secchi, and at about the same time. I had not 

 known of some of these claims and had forgotten others when I wrote 

 the above paper. This will scarcely seem surprising when it is re- 

 membered that the views of Grant, Swan, Von Littrow, and Leverrier 

 had not been made widely public as Secchi' s had by being published 

 in popular treatises and in lectures. It was with some surprise, there- 

 fore, that I found myself charged, not only with ignorance, but, incon- 

 gruously enough, with injustice also, by a fellow-worker in astronomy, 

 who addressed a letter to the editor of the Spectator, advocating in 

 needlessly warm terms the prior claims of Grant and Swan. It is 

 perhaps unnecessary for me to say that the charge of injustice was 

 wholly undeserved ; and I think the writer of the letter would have 

 inferred this had he considered a parallel instance which had recently 

 occurred. For a well-known worker had claimed the very same discovery 

 only a few months before as his own ; and although the subject was 

 specially his, he had not known even of Secchi's numerous public state- 

 ments respecting the sierra, yet no one thought of charging him with 

 injustice. The writer of the letter could scarcely have forgotten the 

 circumstance, since that worker was no other than himself. 



* The reader need hardly be told that the hopes here expressed were 

 completely disappointed. 



