106 
or, at any rate is not employed, for the contact of the 
mind of the learner with the mind of the teacher. The 
lecturer ascends to his chair, recites or reads his stipu- 
lated discourse, and disappears with the mechanical 
routine of an automaton. The professorial staff, it might 
have been added, has as little internal unity as relation- 
ship to its classes. It is a concourse of atoms with no 
affinity except equality of stipends. To call the founda- 
tion a college is to use a manifest misnomer. It is as 
much a college as one at Oxford or Cambridge would be 
with the undergraduates and fellows suppressed, and the 
Master, Dean, Bursar, and Butler left to perpetuate the 
tradition. The Corporation of the City and the Mercers’ 
Company are Sir Thomas Gresham’s trustees, and derive 
very substantial advantages from his bounty. 
“ The inutility of the Gresham Lectures was recognised 
in the days of Dr. Johnson. Johnson lamented as bitterly 
as our correspondent that the able professors of Gresham 
College, which was ‘intended as a place of instruction for 
London, contrived to have no scholars.’ His explanation 
was that the professors lectured gratis, and grew indolent 
from the absence of pecuniary incentives to intellectual 
exertion. ‘We would all, he exclaiméd with conviction, 
“be idle if we could.’ Permission to charge sixpence a 
pupil for each lecture would, in his opinion, have infused 
vitality into the institution ; every professor would forth- 
with have grown ‘emulous to have many scholars.’ There 
could be no harm in administering his specific now. The 
good of a condition such as Gresham College has been 
reduced to is that any experiments may be tried upon it 
without excessive risk. But the failure of the foundation 
arises from deeper sources than those to which Johnson 
attributed it. Several of the present lecturers are no- 
toriously of a temper and standing not to need a money 
bribe to urge them to do their duty. The Dean who is 
the Divinity Professor delights in occasions for eccle- 
siastical exegesis. He would rejoice to find a way of 
gathering five hundred receptive hearers to listen to the 
theological expositions he throws away on a meagre fraction 
of the number. Another Dean was Senior Wrangler, and 
is abundantly competent for the geometrical themes he 
has to discuss. Thesubject of civil law is committed to 
amost capable jurist. The Professor of Music is able 
elsewhere without any endowment to attract to his classes 
a large paying audience. The blame, as our correspondent 
concedes, does not lie with the lecturers, who only slumber 
in concert with their classes and their patrons. It must 
be imputed to the gross contempt which has been 
shown for all the conditions of educational success. Their 
founder intended his seven professors to be professors in 
a College which he did not survive to create. He died at 
the age of sixty, stillimmersed in public affairs, and before 
attaining the leisure for carrying out his idea of an ‘ epitome 
of a University in London.’ Accidents for which it would 
be useless to condemn his trustees would have prevented 
them, had they otherwise been well disposed, from ac- 
complishing his ambitious programme. His estate, so 
far as it was appropriated to the purpose, proved in- 
sufficient for the complete endowment of a College and 
its staff. A collection of lectures was left as it were in 
the air. For a time they appeared to have procured 
favour in spite of their disadvantages. In the nature of 
things they could not keep it permanently. They were 
without soil to take root and sprout in. The error of all 
concerned has been that the want was not supplied by 
incorporating either them in something else or something 
else inthem. Last century was a period of educational, 
though not of intellectual, stagnation. Gresham College 
only languished in company with many other Colleges better 
furnished with the gifts of fortune. The present age has 
witnessed a revival of zeal for instruction by methods in 
which the Gresham foundation might have been turned 
to the greatest service, and has been turned to none. 
While London, and, most of all, the City, was careless of 
NATURE 
[ Fune 4, 1885 
learning, it was no reproach to the managers of Sir 
Thomas Gresham’s bounty that they converted it to no 
account. The absurdity is that for years the town, from its 
centre to its outskirts, has been crying out for educational 
appliances, and that Gresham College is suffered to remain 
as futile and superfluous as ever. Half-a-dozen institutions 
have been erected in or by the City to effect the objects 
for which Sir Thomas designed his foundation. For 
any one of them it would have been the most admirable 
nucleus; it would have afforded a starting point, and 
have bestowed the dignity of old descent. Thus it would 
have gained at last the reason for existence it has been 
craving in vain for a couple of centuries. 
“Tastes of benefactors in distant ages do not always 
agree with the popular inclinations of the present. Re- 
luctance on the part of trustees to deviate from the will of 
the men they represent is to be excused, though it cannot 
always be allowed to block the road to reform. When, 
however, a founder has let posterity into his confidence, 
and the application of his gifts clearly conflicts with his own 
views, it argues strange perversity or default of mental elas- 
ticity not to perceive where genuine respect for his wishes 
should lead. Without a framework in which they could be 
set and mutually co-ordinated, the Gresham Lectures can- 
not possibly do what the founder desired them to do. The 
public spirit of the City would not refuse to take up and 
finish the work which Gresham sketched out if it could 
be secure that his original instalment of beneficence was 
no longer wasted as now. Already it has been endea- 
vouring to fill up the gap by its own exclusive exertions. 
The City of London College, the courses of the University 
Extension Society, lectures at the London Institu- 
tion, the Technical College, Middle Class Schools, and 
not a few institutions besides, are spontaneous efforts 
of the past dozen years to work out the original 
idea of Sir Thomas Gresham. The proper City of 
London College is Gresham College. Around it as the 
centre all the other educational instruments of the 
City ought naturally to group themselves. Not the 
most punctilious conservatism could reprobate the Cor- 
poration and the Mercers’ Company if they would use the 
authority they possess, and seek fresh authority, to aid in 
the promotion of that general result. Gresham College, 
as it is, has been for centuries, and is doomed to be,a 
burlesque of collegiate life. Its lectures must be equally 
dead whether delivered in a dead or a living tongue. Its 
choice is between becoming something more or something 
less than itis now. If it cannot develop, it had better 
cease to be.” 
ELECTRICITY AT THE INVENTIONS 
EXHIBITION 
HE International Inventions Exhibition is intended 
to illustrate the progress of invention during the 
period that has elapsed since the last Great International 
Exhibition in this country in the year 1862. Accordingly 
we find under Group XIII. electricity ranged under twelve 
classes, entitled respectively, generators, conductors, 
testing and measuring apparatus, telegraphic and tele- 
phonic apparatus, electric lighting apparatus, electro- 
metallurgy and electro-chemistry, distribution and utilisa- 
tion of power, electric signalling, lightning-conductors, 
electro medical apparatus, electrolytic methods for ex- 
tracting and purifying metals, electrothermic apparatus. 
Under such a classification there is no doubt that the 
Exhibition might have been made thoroughly repre- 
sentative of the wonderful progress that has taken place 
in this branch of science, both in its theory and 
practice, during the last twenty-three years. The 
reason that it is not so is twofold: electricity has had 
of late years many exhibitions dedicated to itself—those 
of Paris, Vienna,and Sydenham ; and it was quite imposs- 
ible in such an exhibition as the Inventions, where so 
