98 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



GOVERNMENT AID TO SCIENCE. 



AMONG the questions which will occupy the atten- 

 tion of the new Parliament, we think we may safely 

 include, in anticipation, the subject of State inter- 

 vention to secure the progress of physical science.* It 

 will be remembered that this subject was brought be- 

 fore the notice of the British Association, at its recent 

 meeting, by Lieutenant-Colonel Strange, and a com- 

 mittee including the names of Professors Sir "William 

 Thomson, Tyndall, Frankland, "Williamson," Stokes, 

 Fleming, Jenkins, Hirst, and Huxley, Messrs. Glaisher 

 and Huggins, and Drs. Stenhouse, Balfour Stewart, 

 and Mann was appointed to consider and report upon 

 the subject. Science has now reached a peculiar stage 



and in lectures. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I found my- 

 self charged, not only with ignorance, but, incongruously 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 considerred a parallel 

 instance which had recently occurred. For a well-known worker had 

 claimed the very same discovery only a few months before as kis own ; 

 and, although the subject was specially his, he had not known even of 

 Secchi's numwbus public statements 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. 



