MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 49 



captains of industry in Liverpool, who had realised that 

 the application of science to commerce was one of 

 the most important things for commerce itself. (Applause.) 

 Although there was in this country a great amount of 

 private wealth and of private benefaction, he was afraid 

 it must be confessed that the amount which had been 

 devoted to the promotion of University education ' pales 

 its ineffectual fires ' before what had been done in America. 

 In the United States of America as much as £7,000,000 

 had been bequeathed or given in two years to the purposes 

 of University education. The result was that the United 

 States had rich Universities founded by individuals, and 

 he confessed that if he were a man of great wealth he 

 would much rather posterity would remember him as 

 having founded a University, or a chair in a University, 

 than as having been a liberal subscriber to the funds of 

 his party. . . . But there was another kind of warfare 

 which had begun, was continuing, and which we would 

 have with us for many a day. That was the war in 

 commercial supremacy. Even with our own colonies we 

 were beginning to see that there was rivalry in commerce 

 with the mother-country. What were the armaments 

 with which we were to provide ourselves for the purposes 

 of defence in the war of commercial supremacy? They 

 were those provided by science and by scientific research. 

 (Applause.) . . . Waterloo and Trafalgar were things 

 of the past, but what they owed to the Yictorian age was 

 that great spirit of invention which had enabled the 

 expansion of our colonies, and the great increase of 

 wealth in our own country. . . . Were we doing all 

 that we ought to see that any latent genius in the whole 

 of the British nation got the opportunity to come out, and 

 to give to the world those great triumphs of scientific 

 research from which this country had so enormously 



