102 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 



gested, I think that the school-boards will have quite 

 as much on their hands as they are capable of doing 

 well. The influences under which the members of these 

 bodies are elected do not tend to secure fitness for 

 dealing with scientific or technical education; and it is 

 the less necessary to burden them with an uncongenial 

 task, as there are other organizations, not only much 

 better fitted to do the work, but already actually doing it. 

 In the matter of preliminary scientific education, the 

 chief of these is the Science and Art Department, 23 

 which has done more during the last quarter of a century 

 for the teaching of elementary science among the masses 

 of the people than any organization which exists either 

 in this or in any other country. It has become veritably 

 a people's university, so far as physical science is con- 

 cerned. At the foundation of our old universities they 

 were freely open to the poorest, but the poorest must 

 come to them. In the last quarter of a century, the 

 Science and Art Department, by means of its classes 

 spread all over the country and open to all, has con- 

 veyed instruction to the poorest. The University Ex- 

 tension movement 24 shows that our older learned cor- 



23 The Science and Art Department, now the Board of Educa- 

 tion, was created in 1853 and in 1857 established at South Ken- 

 sington. It is a department of government having general charge 

 of education. Huxley speaks of this department, which he 

 served as examiner, as "a measure which came into existence 

 unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more im- 

 portance to the welfare of the people than many political 

 changes over which the noise of battle has rent the air." Scien- 

 tific Education 1869, Collected Essays, III:i3i. 



24 The University Extension movement was commenced by 

 James Stuart, of the University of Cambridge, who wished to 

 establish "a sort of peripatetic university, the professors of 

 which would circulate among the big towns and thus give a 

 wider opportunity for receiving such a teaching." His system 

 was officially adopted by the University of Cambridge in 1873, 

 and by London University and the University of Oxford soon 

 after. 



