LOW-TEMPERATURE RESEARCHES 



From that day till this the character of the Royal 

 Institution has not greatly changed. The enterprise 

 shifted around during its earliest years, while it was 

 gaining -its place in the scheme of things ; but once that 

 was found, like a true British institution it held its 

 course with an inertia that a mere century of time 

 could not be expected to alter. Rumford was the sole 

 founder of the enterprise, but it was Davy who gave it 

 the final and definitive cast. He it was who estab- 

 lished the tradition that the Royal Institution was to 

 be essentially a laboratory for brilliant original inves- 

 tigations, the investigator to deliver a yearly course of 

 lectures, but to be otherwise untrammelled. It occu- 

 pied, and has continued to occupy, the anomalous 

 position of a school to which pupils are on no account 

 admitted, and whose professors teach nothing except 

 by a brief course of lectures to which whoever cares 

 to pay the admission price may freely enter. 



But the marvellous results achieved at the Royal 

 Institution have more than justified the existence of 

 so anomalous an enterprise. Superlatives are always 

 dangerous, but it may well be doubted whether there 

 is another single institution in the world where so 

 many novel original discoveries in physical science 

 have been made as have been brought to light in the 

 laboratories of the building on Albemarle Street dur- 

 ing this first century of its occupancy ; for practically 

 all that is to be credited to Thomas Young, Humphry 

 Davy, Michael Faraday, and John Tyndall, not to men- 

 tion living investigators, is to be credited also to the 

 Royal Institution, whose professorial chairs these great 

 men have successively occupied. Davy spent here the 



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