32 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
industrial fruits of scientific knowledge have long been recog- 
nized? True again, most palpably true; but how the fruit 
is related to the knowledge, how the seed is sown, how it is 
tended, what should be done to nurture the plant, that is not 
known. It is not known because your educational system 
did not achieve this one thing for the community—it did not 
put its victims for a single occasion in their lives in the 
position of asking a simple scientific question, and of faithfully 
finding the answer by experiment. 
Now the portion of knowledge which most completely 
and most vitally interpenetrates our manufactures is Natural 
Science ; and it has been, I think, an incalculable disadvantage 
that while these manufactures were advancing by leaps and 
bounds during the century succeeding the industrial revolution 
(which I suppose may be dated about 1760), there was no 
movement in the educational world for a general dissemination 
of scientific knowledge and skill. During this period, several 
misconceptions took deep root in the English mind. The 
achievements of Arkwright the barber, Hargreaves the weaver, 
Crompton the farmer, Watt the instrument maker, Cartwright 
the clergyman, Stephenson the fireman, Murdoch the mill- 
wright, and of all that illustrious group—their great and funda- 
mental achievements created an overwhelming belief that the 
self-taught inventor was destined to be the only important 
pioneer in industrial discovery ; and to this day a young man 
brought up on a diet of grammar and Samuel Smiles might 
well despair of contributing anything of moment to the service 
of industry, unless indeed he happened to be exceptionally 
poor and to have attended no more showy a place of education 
than a night school. : 
If the universities had set themselves to send a current of 
science through our schools at the time when the direct utility 
of scientific knowledge and of scientific method was becoming 
demonstrable in the industrial world, we should, I think, be 
