L.—EDUCATION. 221 
Brown, Thring and Sanderson—will always swing in our English firmament 
with a rare and undimmed splendour. 
The second point is the advent of science. The nineteenth-century 
renascence of science may correctly date from 1931 and Faraday’s dis- 
coveries, the centenary celebration of which has just preceded our 
Centenary Meeting, but the period from 1840 to 1880 is studded with great 
names and memorable discoveries. As far back as 1830 even the 
Quarterly Review was indicting the British neglect of science as compared 
with the state of things on the Continent ; and I would remind you that 
as late as 1864 at Rugby alone of the older Public Schools and at the newly 
founded Cheltenham, was any Science taught, and that it was unknown for 
example, at Eton, Harrow, St. Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Charterhouse, Merchant 
Taylors, and so forth. It was in the late sixties that the great educational 
struggle began seriously, which I term the advent of science, and I mean 
by that the battle for the principle that an adequate knowledge of physical 
and natural science is advocated not merely for its importance as know- 
ledge or for its vocational or utilitarian value, but for its cultural 
indispensability. In other words, an adequate knowledge of, and training 
in, physical and natural science was proclaimed as an essential element in 
any education claiming to be liberal. If Huxley unquestionably is the 
Achilles and protagonist of this twenty years’ battle for the capture of 
the classical Troy, do not let us forget that one of the first trumpets sounded 
in the fray was in the famous Essays on a Liberal Education, published in 
1867, in which J. M. Wilson, then a master at Rugby, afterwards Head 
Master of Clifton (1879-1890) urged the claims of Science. Wilson died 
this year, aged ninety-six, fighting to the very end for high and noble 
truths. Clarum et venerabile Nomen, indeed, whom in a meeting such 
as this we can salute with affectionate and grateful homage. 
Thirdly, to the renascence of the Public School, the renascence and 
advent of Science, we can add neither a renascence, nor an advent, but the 
creation of a new element in the Educational problem—the education of 
girls and women. The present generation can only reconstruct with 
difficulty and astonishment the conditions of girls’ education in the first 
half of the nineteenth century. What a German Educator said as early 
as 1786 was not wholly untrue sixty years later: ‘ As to the feminine sex, 
especially that of the better classes, it seems as if the State cared little 
whether they grew up into human beings or into monkeys.’ ‘Madam,’ 
wrote a business man in 1858 to the head teacher of one of the better 
girls’ schools, ‘as my daughter is not going to bé a banker, I see no 
purpose in her being taught arithmetic.’ ‘ Everything,’ said Miss Cobbe 
of her school in 1836, ‘ was taught in the inverse ratio of its true importance. 
At the bottom of the scale were morals and religion, and at the top were 
music and dancing.’ To-day, if we choose, in page after page of 
the Report of the Taunton Commission of 1864, which but for the 
pressure of five or six devoted and gifted women would never have 
illegitimately extended its reference from boys’ to girls’ schools—we can 
read the devastating facts and no less devastating comments of the 
Commissioners. The dawn of the new era coincided with the year of 
political revolution, 1848, when Queen’s College, in direct imitation of 
King’s College, was started in Harley Street to ‘ hold classes in all branches 
