6 HISTORY OF THE PAUBENY LABORATORY 



Laboratory under the Ashmolean Museum, dating from the 

 winter of 1822, when he started with thirty-two pupils, 

 who increased to forty-one in the next year 1 . (See 

 Appendix E.) 



Among the signatures of those who attended these early 

 lectures on Chemistry, we find the names of E. B. Pusey and 

 Mark Pattison, of Tait, Whately, and Thomson, the future 

 archbishops of Canterbury, Dublin, and York, of Sir John 

 Bennett Lawes, the originator of the Rothamsted Agricultural 

 Experiments, and of Sir Edmund Head, who became Governor- 

 General of Canada. In 1836 we read that Henry Acland, not 

 content with a single course, paid a three-guinea fee for an 

 ( unlimited attendance * at the lectures on Chemistry : it is not 

 to be wondered that he became Regius Professor of Medicine 

 and Sir Henry Acland, Bart. In the 1837 list we find the 

 signature of John Ruskin ; and in others the names of H. G. 

 Liddell, R. W. Church, Nevil Story, afterwards Maskelyne, 

 Frank Buckland, H. J. Coleridge, Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley, 

 and many others which will be found in the Appendix. 



Dr. Daubeny, no doubt fearing that his acceptance of 

 a second Professorship might lead the ill-informed to pass an 

 unfavourable criticism on pluralists, made use of the oppor- 

 tunity afforded by his inaugural lecture to point out how 

 slender was the emolument derived from either post, and to 

 show that many inquiries of a chemical nature can scarcely be 

 prosecuted without the assistance of a Botanical Garden, and 

 that, on the other hand, some of the most important problems 

 in vegetable physiology require for their elucidation the aid of 

 chemical science. 



1 It is interesting to compare these numbers with those of the attendances 

 at scientific lectures during a previous epoch. By referring to a tract by 

 Edward Tatham, Rector of Lincoln, entitled, A New Address to the Free 

 and Independent Members of Convocation (Oxford, 1810), the curious reader 

 may find that the average attendance at the public lectures in Natural 

 and Experimental Philosophy during fourteen terms in the years 1773-7 

 was close upon fifty, whereas in 1809 the attendance at similar lectures had 

 dropped to fourteen in the Lent term and to so small a number in the 

 Easter and Michaelmas terms that no class was held. The Rector attri- 

 butes the falling off in the attendance at these lectures, as well as at the 

 public lecture on Chemistry, to the operation of the new statute respecting 

 Public Examination which had just been passed. 



