II BIOLOGY AND THE STATE 99 



held up to England as an example of a well supported 

 academical system. Now, I do not think that Mr. 

 Gladstone can have ever had the opportunity of con- 

 sidering the actual facts with regard to German uni- 

 versities, for he was in this instance misled by the 

 official return of expenditure on a single university, 

 namely, that of Strasburg ; the total annual expendi- 

 ture on the twenty-one German universities being, in 

 reality, about £800,000, by the side of which a capital 

 sum of £27,000 looks very small indeed. I cannot 

 but believe that if the facts were known to public men, 

 in reference to the expenditure incurred by foreign 

 States in suj)port of scientific inquiry, they would be 

 willing to do something in this country of a sufficient 

 and statesmanlike character. As it is, the concessions 

 which have been made in this direction appear to me 

 to be in some instances not based upon a really com- 

 prehensive knowledge of the situation. Thus the 

 tentative grant of £4000 a year from the Treasury to 

 the Eoyal Society of London appears to me not to be 

 a well-devised experiment in the promotion of scientific 

 research by means of grants of money, because it is on 

 too small a scale to produce any definite effect, and 

 because the money cannot be relied upon from year to 

 year as a permanent source of support to any serious 

 undertakino\ 



The Eoyal Society most laboriously and conscien- 

 tiously does its best to use this money to the satis- 

 faction of the country, but the task thus assigned to 

 it is one of almost insurmountable difficulty. In fact, 

 no such miniature experiments are needed. The 



