p3 2 KEPORT— 1886. 



acliicvcd. In one department alone — that to which my predecessor in this 

 chair so eloquently adverted in Aberdeen, the department of education in 

 science — how much has been accomplished since 1865. Phillips himself 

 lived to see a great revolution in this respect at Oxford. But no one in 

 1865 could have anticipated that immense development of local schools of 

 science of which your own Mason College and your admirable technical, 

 industrial, and art schools are eminent examples. Based on the general 

 education given by the new system of Board schools, with which the 

 name of the late W. E. Forster will ever be honourably connected, and 

 extending its influence upward to special training and to the highest 

 university examinations, this new scientific culture is opening paths of 

 honourable ambition to the men and women of England scarcely dreamed of 

 in 1865. I sympathise with the earnest appeal of Sir Lyon Playf-^^r, in his 

 Aberdeen address, in favour of scientific education ; but visiting England 

 at rare intervals, I am naturally more impressed with the progress that 

 has been made than with the vexatious delays which have occurred, and am 

 perhaps better able to appreciate the vast strides that have been taken 

 in the direction of that complete and all-pervading culture in science 

 which he has so ably advocated. 



No one could have anticipated twenty years ago that a Birmingham 

 manufacturer, in whose youthfal days there were no schools of science 

 for the people, was about to endow a college, not only worthy of 

 this great city, but one of its brightest ornaments.' Nor could any- 

 one have foreseen the great development of local scientific societies, like 

 your Midland Institute and Philosophical Society, which are now 

 flourishing in every large town and in many of those of less magnitude. 

 The period of twenty-one years that has elapsed since the last Birming- 

 . ham meeting has also been an era of public museums and laboratories 

 ; for the teaching of science, from the magnificent national institutions at 

 South Kensington and those of the great universities and their colleges 

 down to tbose of the schools and field clubs in country towns. It has besides 

 been an era of gigantic progress in original work and in publication, 

 —a progress so rapid that workers in every branch of study have been 

 reluctantly obliged to narrow in more and more their range of reading and 

 of effort' to keep abreast of the advance in their several departments. 

 Lastly these twenty-one years have been characterised as the * coming of 

 age ' of that great system of philosophy with which the names of three 

 Englishmen, Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace, are associated as it founders. 

 Whatever opinions one may entertain as to the sufiiciency and finality of 

 this philosophy there can be no question as to its influence on scientific 

 thought. On the one hand it is inaccurate to compare it with so entirely 

 different things as the discovery of the chemical elements and of the law 

 of gravitation ; on the other, it is scarcely fair to characterise it as a 



■ It was in 1865 that Sir Josiah Mason was, c[uie,tly and without any public note, 

 beginning to lay tlie foundation of &is oFp'^ejna'ge-at Erdington. 



