Minutes of Proceedings. xlvii 



possessed of a scientific hobby. Such men seem almost to have 

 a purer and deeper love for science than the average professional 

 scientist. A slight acquaintance with history suffices to show how 

 much is due to their efforts, and perhaps in no country of the world 

 has this been more conspicuous than in England. To take only 

 a few names of recent times, what a serious diminution of English 

 scientific fame would result from the deletion of such names as Lyell 

 in Geology, Joule in Experimental Physics, Spottiswoode in Pure 

 Mathematics, Darwin in Biology, and Bayleigh in Mathematical 

 Physics ! It is related of a Continental savant who attended a 

 meeting of the British Association, and took part in the proceedings 

 of Section C, that at the outset he dubbed everybody " professor," 

 and that after receiving enlightenment as to the daily calling of 

 a number of the members, he jocularly apologised to a real professor 

 for his mistakes by saying that he had temporarily forgotten that the 

 English were a nation of shopkeepers. Long may this characteristic 

 continue ; and long also may it flourish, as it bids fair to do, in our 

 own and the other colonies under the British Crown. It is worthy 

 of note that almost every one of the scientific men just mentioned 

 had considerable pecuniary means, and point is thus given to 

 the contention that in order to secure due prosecution of research 

 the Government of a country should set apart men for this purpose 

 alone, and by providing proper endowment free them as much as 

 possible from the worry of worldly cares. At onetime in the history 

 of France something like this was actually in operation, any man 

 who had acquired renown in a particular line of investigation having 

 no difficulty in obtaining State assistance to enable him to proceed 

 with his researches, even if a whole special laboratory were needed 

 for the purpose. And France in the time of the Empire is matched 

 by some of the cities of the great Western Republic in our own day. 

 These are the words of a prominent American citizen : " There is 

 another duty which this city owes to itself and to the civilisation of 

 the world. I allude to the endowment for the support of a college of 

 discoverers and a number of men capable not only of expounding 

 established and known truths, but of interrogating nature and 

 discovering new facts, new phenomena, and new principles. The 

 blindness of the public to the value of the abstract sciences and the 

 matter of endowments of colleges for their support is remarkable. It 

 is not every one, however well educated he may be, that is capable of 

 becoming a first-class scientist. Like poets, discoverers are born, 

 not made ; and when one of this class has been found he should be 

 cherished, liberally provided with the means of subsistence, fully 

 supplied with all the implements of information, and his life conse- 



