TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 409 



difficulty of the necessary dissections, next the impossibility of making physiology 

 demonstrative, and thirdly, the abstruseness of the subject. It is impossible to 

 have even an elementary knowledge of the laws of living beings without a very 

 considerable familiarity with those of physics and of chemistry, and even in medical 

 schools it requires all our efforts to prevent it degenerating into a mere dogmatic 

 statement of results, or a laboured repetition of hearsay statements. As an intel- 

 lectual discipline, for facility of demonstration, for the simplicity of the objects, 

 their beauty and interest, their associations with the green lanes and broad moors 

 of England, with the poetry of Gymbeline and Lycidas, with fairy tales and local 

 folk-lore — Botany is to my mind the branch of natural science which is above all 

 others to be chosen where one only can be taught. Next in importance I would 

 place Elementary Physics, the knowledge of the simplest laws of masses at rest 

 and in motion, of heat and light. Its great recommendations are its precision, its 

 constant and useful illustrations in daily life, the interest it gives to the handicrafts 

 and manufactures in which so large a number of English boys and girls are busied, 

 and the necessity of such knowledge as the first step in acquiring all other natural 

 sciences. 



First, then, I would that every Sheffield girl should love flowers with the deep 

 and abiding affection of familiar knowledge, and that every Sheffield lad should 

 know every common plant in your beautiful woods and find his purest pleasure on 

 the heights of Bell Hag and the broad expanse of Stanage Edge. And next I would 

 that your workmen and workboys should know so much of mechanics that they 

 may take an intelligent pride in your vast factories, and that in some of them may 

 be awakened the genius to which we trust to repeat in future generations the 

 national services of Arkwright, and AVatt, and Stevenson. 



With regard to the endowment of research in Biology, I must confess that I 

 should be sorry to see it undertaken by government funds. That such investigations 

 are of public interest, that they are difficult and expensive, and that at present they 

 languish for want of adequate support, is all true. But this country is not so poor, 

 nor our countrymen so wanting in public spirit, that we need appeal to the national 

 purse to supply every ascertained want. Great as is the national importance of 

 science, the nation is more important still ; and even if that were the alternative, I 

 would rather that we should indefinitely be dependent on Germany for our know- 

 ledge than give up the local energy, the unofficial zeal which has made England 

 what she is. Far better for the strength and the civilization of the nation that a 

 thousand pounds were raised every year for the endowment of unremunerative 

 researches in this wealthy town of Sheffield, than that ten thousand were paid you 

 by a paternal monarch or an enlightened department. 



But surely there is no need for us to go to Parliament for such sums as we 

 require. In the first place, scientific men themselves show a good example of not 

 asking before they give. There is the modest sum whicli we raise in this Association, 

 there are the funds for helping research of the Royal Society, the Chemical Society, 

 the British Medical Association, the Iron and Steel Institute, the Whitworth Scholar- 

 ships. Next we have the resources of our Universities, which have scarcely begun 

 to apply themselves to the task. I need do no more than allude to the Cavendish 

 Laboratory, or to the Physiological School, at Cambridge, where a simple College 

 tutor, of rare ability, and of still more rare sympathy and energy, has, in ten years, 

 achieved results which we need not shrink from comparing with those of the great 

 continental laboratories. The magnificent Museum of Anatomy, maintained by the 

 College of Surgeons almost entirely out of their own funds, is another instance of 

 private care for science to which we find no parallel abroad ; and the Zoological 

 Society wisely spends a large part of its income in prosecuting Comparative Anatomy, 

 and publishing its beautifully illustrated Memoirs. 



But beside the efforts of scientific bodies and the wealth of our national Uni- 

 versities, we may surely look to the public spirit of ancient companies and corpora- 

 tions to do something for the cause of science. In the middle ages our country 

 was covered with parish churches by private munificence : in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury most of our public and grammar schools were endowed ; in later times our 

 great religious and charitable societies were founded. May we not hope that, 



