156 PATRONAGE OF SCIENCE. [CHAP. XU. 



of this department. One of the new chairs is now filled by a 

 zoologist of the highest European reputation, Professor Agassiz. 

 A splendid bequest also, of equal amount (100,000 dollars), has 

 recently been made to the Cambridge Observatory, for which the 

 country had already obtained, at great cost, a large telescope, 

 which has resolved the great nebula in Orion, and has enabled 

 the astronomer, Mr. Bond, simultaneously with an English ob 

 server, Mr. Lassell, to discover a new satellite of Saturn. 



That the State, however, will not be checked by any narrow 

 utilitarian views in its patronage of the university and the higher 

 departments of literature and science, we may confidently infer 

 from the grants made so long ago as March, 1830, by the frugal 

 Legislature of Massachusetts, for a trigonometrical survey, and 

 for geological, botanical, and zoological explorations of the coun 

 try, executed by men whose published reports prove them to have 

 been worthy of the trust. It was to be expected that some dem 

 agogues would attempt to persuade the people that such an ex 

 penditure of public money was profligate in the extreme, and that 

 as the universities have a dangerous aristocratic tendency, so these 

 liberal appropriations of funds for scientific objects were an evi 

 dence that the Whig party were willing to indulge the fancies 

 of the few at the charge of the many. Accordingly, one orator 

 harangued the fishermen of Cape Cod on this topic, saying that 

 the government had paid 1500 dollars out of the Treasury to 

 remunerate Dr. Storer for what ? for giving Latin names to 

 some of the best known fish ; for christening the common cod 

 Morrhua americana, the shad Alosa vulgaris, and the fall her 

 ring Clupea vulgaris. His electioneering tactics did not suc 

 ceed ; but might they not have gained him many votes in certain 

 English constituencies? Year after year, subsequently to 1837, 

 the columns of &quot; the leading journal&quot; of Great Britain were filled 

 with attacks in precisely the same style of low and ignorant ridi 

 cule against the British Association, and the memoirs of some of 

 the ablest writers in Europe on natural history and science, who 

 were assailed with vulgar abuse. Such articles would not have 

 been repeated so perseveringly, nor have found an echo in the 

 &quot; British Critic&quot; and several magazines, had they not found sym- 



