~ ADDRESS. evii 
Botanical Gardens and Museum at Kew, and the Museum of Practical Geo- 
logy in Jermyn Street, are examples of the National Policy in regard to 
Science, of which we can hardly over-estimate the importance. Most highly 
and gratefully also do we appreciate the cooperation of the ‘ Board of Trade’ 
with our Meteorologists, by the recent formation of the Department for the 
collection of meteorological observations made at sea. 
But not by words only would, or does, Science make return to Govern- 
ments fostering and aiding her endeavours for the public weal. Every prac- 
tical application of her discoveries tends to the same end as that which the 
enlightened Statesman has in view. 
The steam-engine in its manifold applications, the crime-decreasing gas- 
lamp, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, the law of storms and 
rales for the mariner’s guidance in them, the power of rendering surgical 
operations painless, the measures for preserving public health and for pre- 
venting or mitigating epidemics,—such are amongst the more important 
practical results of pure scientific research with which mankind have been 
blessed and States enriched. They are evidence unmistakeable of the close 
affinity between the aims and tendencies of Science and those of true State 
policy. In proportion to the activity, productivity, and prosperity of a com- 
munity is its power of responding to the calls of the Finance Minister. By 
a far-seeing one, the man of Science will be regarded with a favourable eye, 
not less for the unlooked-for streams of wealth that have already flowed, but 
for those that may in future arise, out of the applications of the abstract 
truths to the discovery of which he devotes himself. 
This may, indeed, demand some measure of faith on the part of the prac- 
tical Statesman. For who that watched the philosophi¢c Brack experimenting 
on the abstract nature of Caloric could have foreseen that his discovery of latent 
heat would be the stand-point of Watt’s invention of a practically operative 
steam engine! How little could the observer of Orrstxp’s subtle arrange- 
ments for converting electric into magnetic force have dreamt of Wheat- 
stone’s application of such discovery to the rapid interchange of ideas now 
daily practised between individuals in distant cities, countries, and continents ! 
, Some medical contemporaries of Joun Hunter, when they saw him, as 
they thought, wasting as much time in studying the growth of a deer’s horn 
as they would have bestowed upon the symptoms of their best patient, com- 
passionated, it is said, the singularity of his pursuits. But, by the insight so 
gained into the rapid enlargement of arteries, Hunter learnt a property of 
those vessels which emboldened him to experiment on a man with aneurism, 
and so to introduce a new operation which has rescued from a lingering and 
painful death thousanis of his fellow-creatures. Our great inductive physio- 
logist, in his dissections and experiments on the lower animals, was “ taking 
light what may be wrought upon the body of man.” 
The production of chloroform is amongst the more subtle experimental 
results of modern chemistry. The blessed effects of its proper exhibition in 
