8 SCIENCE AXD CULTURE. 



The kindly heart would be moved, the high sense of 

 social duty would be satisfied, by the spectacle of well- 

 earned wealth, neither squandered in tawdry luxury and 

 vainglorious show, nor scattered with the careless char- 

 ity which blesses neither him that gives nor him that 

 takes, but expended in the execution of a well-consid- 

 ered plan for the aid of present and future generations 

 of those who are willing to help themselves. 



"We shall all be of one mind thus far. But it is 

 needful to share Priestley's keen interest in physical 

 science; and to have learned, as he had learned, the 

 value of scientific training in fields of inquiry apparently 

 far remote from physical science; in order to appre- 

 ciate, as he would have appreciated, the value of the 

 noble gift which Sir Josiah Mason has bestowed upon 

 the inhabitants of the Midland district. 



For us children of the nineteenth century, however, 

 the establishment of a college under the conditions of 

 Sir Josiah Mason's Trust, has a significance apart from 

 any which it could have possessed a hundred years ago. 

 It appears to be an indication that we are reaching the 

 crisis of the battle, or rather of the long series of bat- 

 tles, which have been fought over education in a cam- 

 paign which began long before Priestley's time, and will 

 probably not be finished just yet. 



In the last century, the combatants were the cham- 

 pions of ancient literature, on the one side, and those of 

 modern literature on the other ; but, some thirty years * 

 * The advocacy of the introduction of physical science into general cdu- 



