304 INDUSTRIAL MUSEUMS IN THEIR 



with the plantation ; so that the plants may, in a short period, extend 

 over the length and breadth of the island, and secure those advantages 

 to the country which they are capable of conferring, when the experi- 

 ment and energies of this institution shall have arrived at a happy 

 result. 



Botanic Garden, Bath, Jamaica, Dec. 1863. 



INDUSTRIAL MUSEUMS IN THEIR RELATION TO 

 COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE. 



BY THE LATE PROFESSOR GEORGE WILSON. 



The industrial museums of the country have not risen in obedience 

 to any sudden romantic impulse of educational enthusiasts or hypothe- 

 tical philosophers, but have slowly grown into a visible reality, and 

 forced themselves on the notice of the practical intellects of the country. 

 How this has been, a few words will explain. 



The long peace which followed Waterloo gave ns leisure to neglect 

 war ; to apply the sciences to the useful arts ; and to interchange with 

 our brethren of mankind on all sides, the important discoveries and 

 inventions which they and we had severally achieved. "When the 

 French Revolution awoke Europe from its perilous slumber, it awoke 

 the philosopher as well as the soldier and statesman, and Watt's steam 

 engines and Davy's voltaic batteries were fruits of the same energy 

 which dethroned the Bourbons, and won Waterloo. When peace at 

 length came, discovery followed discovery, and invention invention, 

 with a rapidity such as the world never witnessed before. Four of 

 those, partly discoveries, partly inventions — namely, steamships, rail- 

 roads, locomotives, and electric telegraphs — the beginnings of which 

 were long before the peace, but their practical evolution not till long 

 after it, were of themselves sufficient to have necessitated industrial 

 museums, by their effect in abridging space and time. Keats, the poet, 

 in his Eve of St. Agnes, imagines with exquisite fancy the possibility 

 of a full-blown rose becoming " a bud again." We have seen some- 

 thing of the kind happen. The great globe has seemed before our 

 eyes to contract into smaller dimensions, and all the cities on its sur- 

 face to come closer together, and almost to look in at each other's 

 windows. AVhen such things have occurred as the simultaneous 

 announcement to every capital of Europe that Czar Nicholas was dead, 

 ■who has not felt as if the cities of the globe were visibly separated by 

 no other barrier than the almost imperceptible wire-fence of the electric 

 telegraph I 



