-s/A' WILLIAM .s /A.!//.. Y.V, F.R.S. 231 



which was better than any other that could be handed down tn 

 them a capital that would ever increase and always produce 

 good fruits. 



Science and art schools had in recent years been greatly 

 developed, and one would think that development was most 

 natural in the great centres of industry such as Manchester, 

 Birmingham, Liverpool, and such like places. But it was most 

 gratifying to find in a secluded town like Tunbridge Wells, where 

 manufacture was not carried on in such a prominent manner as in 

 the great towns he had mentioned, that the work of instruction 

 in science and art went on steadily, showed year by year better 

 results, and brought forth fruit. When he spoke of fruits he 

 did not mean pounds, shillings, and pence only, but fruits which 

 would be more permanent than that. 



The time was, indeed, when this county of Kent was an 

 industrial centre, and when the iron smelting of the country was 

 done chiefly in Kent and the neighbouring county of Sussex. 

 How little industry was thought of 300 years ago might be 

 gathered from the fact that in Queen Elizabeth's time an Act 

 was passed for the purpose of putting down iron smelting in this 

 county, inasmuch as it was regarded simply as a nuisance, as it 

 used up a great deal of timber from the forests, and interfered 

 consequently with deer hunting, which was then one of the great 

 national pastimes. 



The consequence of that Act was that iron smelting lingered 

 and lingered till two centuries later, when Dudley, a plain 

 common sense man, conceived the idea of smelting iron by 

 means of stone coal, as it was then called, instead of wood. He 

 put the coal into an oven, and burnt it into coke, with which 

 he smelted the iron, and found that it performed the operation 

 just as well as charcoal. This laid the foundation of that mighty 

 industry of this country, which was now one of the chief sources 

 of our national wealth. 



It was not, however, till little more than a century ago that a 

 mighty impulse was given to another great industry in Lancashire 

 by Compton and Arkwright, who first developed mechanical cotton 

 spinning. Now, instead of a million persons using spinning 

 wheels, there was one machine in Manchester which would perform 

 an equal amount of work. 



