34 
duty of government at the present time. The brief experi- 
ment tried at South Kensington, a short time ago, by Prof. 
Huxley, aided by Dr. Kay Lankester and Professor Michael 
Foster, is one which from its costliness must be prosecuted 
by the Government if carried on at all, because if it is to be 
productive of the full measure of the benefit to the nation 
of which it is capable, it must be carried on in a prolonged 
manner and on a very large scale. Such a work would, it 
appears to me, be accepted by the members of the House of 
Commons as involving a legitimate expenditure of the public 
finances, because it would be in strict accordance with that 
system of training of teachers to which they have already 
given their official sanction. Such a system, if regularly 
organised and perseveringly sustained, would tend to 
create an army of men competent to become original 
workers, and if this method was followed up by the estab- 
lishment of local colleges in all the great centres of industry, 
there would be found permanent spheres of labour for the 
students thus trained. Two things needful to our national 
well-being would thus be attained; we should enrich the 
country by an extension of those scientific researches which 
within our own lifetime have proved to be so fertile a source of 
national wealth, and we should extend a scientific educa- 
tional organisation which the fashionable quackeries of the 
day shew to be a necessary adjunct to that almost 
exclusively literary one which has so long monopolised the 
teaching functions in this country. 
Mr. Charles Bailey exhibited specimens of Carex 
'punctata, Gaudin, which he had collected in August last 
on the damp, narrow ledges of perpendicular rocks near a 
water-fall, on the north side of a small bay, named Water- 
winch, about a mile north of Tenby, Pembrokeshire. This 
Ca.rex, although it has long held a place in English floras, 
on the authority of some Cornish specimens seen by Dr. 
