G 
support and encouragement from the State, until, in the year 
1851, its working staff contained not only practical geologists 
and field surveyors, but a naturalist, a mining surveyor, a mine- 
ralogist, a metallurgist, and a chemist ; and the extensive fossil 
and other collections, which were not only the fruit of the labours 
of the survey, but the justification of its maps, were lodged in 
the new and spacious museum in Jermyn Street, which had been 
expressly built for their display and for the purposes of the 
Survey, by the Government of Sir Robert Peel. 
In order, therefore, to establish a school of mines, little more 
was necessary than that the Government should formally 
authorize a certain number of the officers of the Survey to 
teach those sciences with which it was their official duty to be 
acquainted; and, in fact, when the Government School of Mines 
was instituted in 1851, all its professors, with a single exception, 
were officers of the Survey and Museum, and the students were 
taught in the theatres and laboratories, and by means of the 
collections which appertained to the pre-existing establishment. 
The principal object of the Institution which had thus naturally 
grown out of, or engrafted itself upon, the Geological Survey of 
the United Kingdom, has always been and is, to discipline the 
students of the school thoroughly in the principles of those 
sciences upon which the operations of the miner and metallurgist 
depend. Of course, nothing but experience in the mine and in 
the laboratory can confer the skill and tact requisite for the prac- 
tical conduct of those operations ; but, on the other hand, it 
is only by an acquaintance with scientific principles that the 
beginner can profit by that experience and improve upon the 
processes of liis predecessors. 
But while it has been the chief aim of the Government 
School of Mines to become to Britain what the Bergakademie of 
Freiberg and the Ecole des Mines of Paris, are to Germany and 
to France, the minister by whose instructions the British 
equivalent of these well kiiown foreign institutions was founded, 
expressly stipulated that the professors should deliver annually, 
at a nominal admission fee, a course of Lectures to Working Men. 
It appears to have been considered right than an institution 
subsidised by the nation should contribute to a certain extent 
to the great national object of educating those who are prevented 
by circumstances from educating themselves. These lectures were 
commenced in 1851, and the attendance upon them was so large, 
and the interest taken in the subjects discussed by the classes to 
