634 
Mr. Balfour said he counted it a most happy and fortunate 
circumstance that he had been able to take any part whatsoever” 
_in an occasion which was interesting, not merely to Manchester 
or merely to Lancashire, but to the whole of a country which 
depended in an ever-increasing degree upon its power to pre- 
serve its position as a great manufacturing centre. The building 
was perhaps the greatest fruit of that kind of municipal enter- 
prise in this country, and though he would be presumptuous in 
saying that the brief visit he had been able to pay to it had 
given him any adequate or sufficient idea of all that it was 
capable of doing for the industries of Lancashire, still nobody 
‘could go over the building, observe its equipment, study even 
in the most cursory manner the care which had been devoted to 
it, without feeling that the corporation had set a great example 
worthy of the place it held in Lancashire and in Great 
Britain. 
The great building in which they were assembled was an out- 
ward and visible sign of that awakening which had come over 
our people in view of the ever-changing conditions of intellectual 
industry. There was a time when we could flatter ourselves 
without any undue egotism or vanity that not only were we the 
first of the industrial nations, but that the rest were nowhere. 
That time had passed never to return again, and he was far from 
uttering selfish complaints at that change in the condition of the 
world which was absolutely inevitable, and from which they 
ought not to be, and in his judgment would not be, the ultimate 
losers. It was a profound mistake to suppose that the fact that 
other nations were now great producing centres was an injury 
pure and simple to this country. It was nothing of the kind. 
The growth of the wealth of the world must be a benefit to 
every part of the world, and all that we had to do was to see 
that we bore our full share in the great industrial development. 
But not only was there the change in the industrial condition 
of the world to which he had adverted, but another change had 
occurred more closely connected, perhaps, with the necessity 
for institutions of this character. It was the change from the pre- 
scientific to the scientific stage of industry. When England or 
Great Britain first obtained its great manufacturing monopoly, it 
was not too much to say that the relation between science and 
industry was of the feeblest character. There was always, of 
course, the closest connection between mechanical ingenuity and 
invention and the great growth of our industries, but the in- 
timate correlation between the discoveries of the laboratory and 
the processes of the workshop was not in existence, and it was 
because we had been a little slow to discover in this country 
how intimately speculative research is connected with manu- 
facturing progress that we were, in some branches of our work 
at all events, behind our neighbours, who in this respect, 
although not in many others, had proved themselves more ready 
and more apt to learn that lesson than we had ourselves. And 
if anybody wanted a proof of the truth of the proposition he 
was laying down they had only to recall the kind of meaning 
which the average man attached only a few years ago to the 
phrase ‘‘technical instruction.” In the phrase ‘‘ technical in- 
struction’ there was, in the minds of the people of whom he 
spoke, no scientific tinge or flavour whatever, but some kind of 
‘knowledge of manual dexterity, some opportunity for learning 
“the uses of machinery, and so forth, But the fact on which he 
was venturing to insist, and on which the very existence and justi- 
fication of an institution like that at Manchester depended, was 
that henceforth and evermore there would be a closer and closer 
connection between the most remote and abstract scientific study 
of the chemist, of the physicist, of the electrician in his labor- 
atory, and the great industries of the community of which he 
was a member. He wished he could be quite sure that even now, 
and even in the more cultivated part of the community, there 
was a more perfect appreciation of two capital facts which he 
would like to impress upon all who heard him. One was that 
education was, and must be, an-organic whole, and that it was 
perfectly vain to spend vast sums upon buildings and equipments 
unless the student who went to those places went adequately 
prepared to learn the lesson they could teach. He had not the 
slightest intention of over-exalting or over-praising foreign na- 
tions at the expense of our own, but it must be admitted that 
they had grasped much more fully and much more firmly the 
great truth on which he was insisting—namely, that a man 
really to profit by the scientific training which he could get in 
these institutions and to be able himself to turn the learning he 
acquired to the purpose of original discovery, it may be of 
original research of his own, had to go there, not a raw product, 
NO. 1721, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
[OcToBER 23, 1902 
but at all events a half-prepared human product. He should go 
there, not only anxious to learn, but ready to learn, 
Another great truth was that, after all, the persons who were 
responsible for the manufactures of the country were the manu- 
facturers. It was perfectly vain and useless to turn out highly- 
trained and capable servants if there were not to be employers 
for them when they were turned out. He did not in the least 
know whether in Germany, for instance, they might not have 
overdone the matter; he had not sufficient evidence on the 
point, but he was quite sure something must be very wrong 
when he saw the extraordinary difference in the practice of the 
great German and in some, at all events, of the English firms. 
He was speaking on a subject which he only knew at second 
hand to people who knew the whole thing at first hand ; but, 
unless his information greatly erred, they would find, if they 
went to Germany, at all events a few years ago, and studied the 
equipment of one of the great German industrial concerns, 
electrical, chemical, optical or what not, a proportion of 
scientifically trained students in the German manufactory 
enormously in excess of anything commonly thought necessary 
in this country. There was not the least use in the Manchester 
Corporation turning out competent students if those students 
were not to find employment when they were turned out. With 
the naturally conservative instincts of our nation, the tradition 
of the great manufacturing establishments would rather tend to 
make people say that the best, the only place in which to learn 
was not in the lecture-room, but in the shop, not at the feet of 
skilled professors, but actually among the artisans who were 
carrying on the industry, and he did not deny there was a great 
deal of truth in that, and that probably we gained a great deal 
by our extreme anxiety to make industrial training a practical 
training. But he felt confident that they drove that truth too 
far, and that, however sound the instinct might be which lay at 
the bottom of it, they were working it too hard at the present 
time, and that, if they really did mean to turn the brains, and 
the muscles, and the enterprise, and the energy, and the in- 
ventive skill of their countrymen to its best purpose, it was 
absolutely necessary to place among the directors of industry 
those who had not merely that admirable and necessary practical 
knowledge which consisted in seeing things done from day to 
day by the people who had to sell the article when it was 
finished, but, in addition, they must give that complete scientific 
training which had become more the basis of our whole industrial 
fabric. 
He did not deny that there might be dangers in that course. 
Every policy they adopted required watching ; every policy they 
adopted would petrify into some stupid and pedantic rules unless 
they kept close to the ever-varying realities of life, and if any- 
body said there might be a certain danger that they would have 
a guasz-scientific and industrial orthodoxy which would stand 
in the way of quick development in every new discovery in 
mechanics or in science, he did not deny that the danger might 
possibly exist. The way to meet it was to remember that true 
theory and true practice could never be divorced without loss to 
both, and that the ideal for which they had to strive was not 
that of simply imitating the processes of those who went before, 
but imitating their energy, their anxiety to take the best the 
world had to give—the world both of practice and of theory— 
in the changed and ever-changing conditions of our time, Let 
them imitate this great quality of their forefathers, and then 
institutions like that school would bear all the fruit of 
which they were capable. They would see the marriage of 
science and industry far more fertile and far more productive of 
good, and those who had called, and not called in vain, on 
Manchester for this great effort of municipal liberality might 
feel that their labours had not been thrown away, but that they 
had done great things for the growth, the maintenance and the 
expansion of those industries on which the health and existence 
of the community depended. 
NOTES. 
THE office of Meteorological Reporter to the Government of 
India will become vacant n about a year by the retirement of 
Mr. J. Eliot, F.R.S., who has administered the office with 
great success for a long series of years. The selection of 
suitable names for consideration, with a view to the filling of 
the prospective vacancy after a preliminary period of training in 
Europe and in India, is now occupying the attention of an 
