NA TURE 



121 



THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1887. 



TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN MANCHESTER. 



pROFESSOR HUXLEY could scarcely have antici- 

 -*- pated the ready response Manchester has given 

 to the challenge he threw down at the close of his 

 most able address at the Town Hall on the 29th ult. 

 In speaking of one of the great problems of the day, that 

 of meeting ever-increasing competition and yet maintain- 

 ing the proper social condition of the workers, he said : — 

 " I have ventured to put this before you in a bare and 

 almost cynical fashion because it will justify the strong 

 appeal which I make to all concerned in this work of 

 promoting industrial education to have a care at the 

 same time that the conditions of industrial life remain 

 those in which the physical energies of the population 

 may be maintained at a proper level, in which their moral 

 state may be cared for, in which there may be some days 

 of hope and pleasure in their lives, and in which the sole 

 prospect of a life of labour may not be an old age of 

 penury. ... I therefore confidently appeal to you to let 

 those impulses have full sway, and not to rest until you 

 have done something better and greater than has yet 

 been done in this country in the direction in which we 

 are now going." 



Only a few hours before the utterance of these words 

 the trustees of the late Sir Joseph Whitworth— who during 

 his life-time did so much to encourage and promote the 

 higher education of working engineers— made a munificent 

 offer to the city of Manchester ; an offer which was only 

 made public by Mr. Darbishire after Prof. Huxley had 

 finished his address, and which goes some way towards 

 realizing what Prof. Huxley remarks may by some be 

 looked upon as the Utopian dream of a student. The 

 gift consists of a plot of land of about twenty-five acres 

 in one of the best situations in the city, which the trustees 

 have purchased for the sum of ^47,000. They propose 

 to offer the whole of this to the Corporation of Manchester 

 upon trust, two-thirds to be maintained as a public park, 

 and one-third as a site for the following institutions : 

 (i) an appropriate Institute of Art, with galleries for 

 paintings, for sculpture and moulded form, and for archi- 

 tectural illustration ; (2) a comprehensive Museum of Com- 

 mercial Materials and Products ; (3) a Technical School 

 on a complete scientific and practical scale. The neqessary 

 buildings are to be raised by the Corporation and by public- 

 spirited inhabitants of the great district which owns Man- 

 chester as its metropolis ; and the Whitworth Trustees 

 add that, if this work be heartily undertaken, their own 

 further contributions may be looked for. 



Such a result of the movement for the Extension 

 of Technical Education and for the higher culture of 

 our toiling thousands may indeed be welcomed, and 

 the National Association, under whose auspices this 

 meeting was held, may well be congratulated on this 

 outcome of its autumn work. But this is not all 

 for it is not unhkely that the surplus, amounting, 

 it is believed, to about ^50,000, now placed at the 

 disposal of the guarantors of the Jubilee Exhibition, may 

 be applied to furthering this enterprise. Manchester 

 has thus before it the prospect of showing England 

 Vol. XXXVII.— No. 945. 



what can be done to promote educational progress 

 in this direction, and to inaugurate a movement 

 which ought to be followed by all the great cities 

 in the country. Can we doubt that the sons of those 

 whose energy and clear-sightedness have in times past 

 placed Manchester in the van of the most important 

 social movements of the day will prove themselves equal 

 to the task which they have now a splendid opportunity 

 of accomplishing ? It is by caring thus for the well-b»ing 

 of our workers that the stable condition of society, 

 referred to by Prof. Huxley, can be best secured ; for truer 

 words were never spoken than those in which he stated 

 his belief that, in order to succeed in the competition 

 which is every day becoming more keen, it is not suffi- 

 cient that our people shall have the knowledge and the 

 skill which are required, but that they must also have the 

 will and energy and the honesty without which neither 

 knowledge nor skill can be of any permanent avail. Mere 

 technical instruction in handicraft or science must, in 

 short, be based on a sound preliminary education. We 

 need to train our workers to be not only clever artisans, 

 but honest men who take pride in the quality no less 

 than in the quantity of their work. It is because these 

 were the views upheld by Sir Joseph Whitworth, and 

 acted upon by him during his lifetime, that his trustees 

 have felt that in no better way could they carry out the 

 important ends for which he laboured than by start- 

 ing a movement having for its object not merely the 

 technical training of the artisan, but his moral, intellec- 

 tual, and physical advancement. H. E. R, 



TRIDIMENSIONAL FORMULAE IN ORGANIC 



CHEMISTRY. 

 Dix Annees dans VHistoire d'une Th^orie. Deuxi^me 

 Edition de " La Chimie dans L'Espace." Par J. H. 

 Van 't Hoff. (Rotterdam : P. M. Bazendijk, 1887.) 



THIS interesting monograph gives an account, partly 

 historical, partly expository, of what in our opinion 

 is the most important theoretical contribution towards 

 solving the problem of the constitution of organic com- 

 pounds that has been made since the idea of a definite 

 union of atoms within the molecule was first introduced 

 into chemistry, of which idea, indeed, the new theory is an 

 expansion. The work has the advantage of being written 

 by one of the originators of the theory. 



The linked-atom formulae, which have so powerfully 

 aided the development of organic chemistry, never pro- 

 fessed to give any information as to the relative positions 

 of the atoms in space. All that the " links " or " bonds " 

 denoted was the existence of a closer relation of attraction 

 (of a kind not further specified) between atoms represented 

 as directly linked than between atoms represented as 

 not directly linked. The question of the actual posi- 

 tion of these atoms was left entirely open. If, therefore, 

 anyone gathered from the graphic formula of methanci 



H 



I 

 H— C— H, 



I 

 H 



for example, that the five atoms of this compound were 

 necessarily situated in one plane, that person was merely 



G 



