33 
of Edinburgh, Session 1875 - 76 . 
In the year 1873, Josiah Mason, who had made a large fortune 
as a manufacturer at Birmingham and Kidderminster, gave the 
princely sum of L.250,000 (or the erection and endowment of a 
College of Practical Science in Birmingham. 
In January 1874, an association was formed for the promotion of 
scientific industry in Lancaster, at which the Earl of Derby pre- 
sided — an association formed chiefly at the instance of Lancaster 
manufacturers and artizans, who, having visited the Vienna Inter- 
national Exhibition held in the autumn of 1873, had seen there 
the rapid and alarming progress of Continental nations in many of 
the arts. 
In the same year, the Yorkshire College of Science was begun in 
Leeds, of which college Lord Frederick Cavendish is president, 
there being L. 100,000 subscribed for it. 
In the course of last summer, steps were taken to establish in 
Bristol a College of Science, to be affiliated to Oxford University, 
for which L. 26,000 has been already subscribed. Nottingham, 
Sheffield, and other towns, not so wealthy as to found colleges, are, 
however, stirring for the establishment of schools and societies for 
the teaching of classes. 
In Scotland, Dundee is stirring, wishing to have a college which 
is to be affiliated with St Andrews University, and for which it is 
proposed to raise as much as L. 200,000. 
Nor are our old, time-honoured national universities, in the 
midst of this great educational movement, asleep. Asleep or in- 
different they could scarcely remain, for very obvious reasons. 
Both at Cambridge and at Oxford, science lectures and fellowships 
have been at length introduced ; and the Chancellor of Cambridge, 
the noble Duke of Devonshire, has, from his own funds, presented 
that university with a splendid chemical and physical laboratory, 
having a most complete apparatus, at a cost of L. 10, 000. 
Our own University of Edinburgh has during the last five years 
had three new chairs created and endowed for engineering, geology, 
and political economy; and farther measures of extension, on a 
large scale, are being adopted, for which above L. 85, 000 have been 
already subscribed. 
Even the farmers , who are not generally proverbial for moving 
out of old paths, or even for moving in them, except at a slow pace, 
VOL. IX. 
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