1855 THE LECTURES TO WORKING MEN 199 



tion ; (2) Lectures on the elements of Botany and 

 Fossil Plants." 



This reorganisation of his course went hand in 

 hand with his utilisation of the Jennyn Street 

 Museum for paleontological teaching, and all through 

 1857 he was busily working at the Explanatory 

 Catalogue. 



Moreover, in 1855 he had begun at Jermyn Street 

 his regular courses of lectures to working men 

 lectures which impressed those qualified to judge as 

 surpassing even his class lectures. Year after year 

 he gave the artisans of his best, on the principle 

 enunciated thus early in a letter of February 27, 

 1855, to Dyster 



I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures 

 (Popular Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the 

 Lord) I am about to give here. I want the working 

 classes to understand that Science and her ways are great 

 facts for them that physical virtue is the base of all 

 other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all 

 the rest not because fellows in black with white ties tell 

 them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of 

 nature which they must obey " under penalties." 



I am sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to 

 try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who 

 live among facts. You will be with me, I know. 



And again on May 6, 1855 : 



I am glad your lectures went off so well. They were 

 better attended than mine [the Preliminary Course], 

 although in point of earnestness and attention my audience 

 was all I could wish. I am now giving a course of the 



