4$3 
1 880.] Report on Scientific Societies . 
several London and provincial scientific societies. But 
should there any difficulties arise,— such as impeded the 
union that it was once intended to establish between the 
Geological Society, I believe, and the Royal Society,— then 
it will be a case for the Royal Commissioners to step in, as 
was done in the instance of the colleges on the occasion of 
the university reform. 
Requesting of you the favour to communicate this letter 
to your fellow Commissioners, 
I remain, my dear sir, 
Yours very sincerely, 
C. K. Akin. 
To G. G. Stokes, Esq., M.A., Sec. R.S., one of the Royal 
Commissioners on Scientific Instruction and the Advance- 
ment of Science, London. 
Pesth, June 26, 1870. 
My Dear Sir, 
In the present letter I shall consider the efficiency of 
the instruction and aids to research derived— 
Of the Universities and kindred Institutions . — As for the 
universities, my observations have reference only to Oxfoid 
and Cambridge, which I know by personal experience ; and 
as for the other institutions, I shall limit my remarks to the 
Royal and the London Institutions. 
To the minds of the uninitiated, especially of the uniniti- 
ated foreigners, an account of the English Universities, of 
their colleges and foundations for professorships, fellowships, 
scholarships, and the like, must appear as the realisation of 
the ideal institution which is to ensure the perpetual advance 
of science and learning ; yet when we come to look to fadts, 
however useful colleges may have proved with regard to 
education, their tendency has not been to foster any such 
scientific activity as that of which their several foundations 
seem to hold out the prospedt. Perhaps it might not be 
uninstrudtive to count up the number of modern English 
scholars, philosophers, and thinkers who have lived, or still 
live, without the pale of the universities; and it will be 
contested by no one that, in Germany, at least, the univer- 
sities are in a much higher degree centres both of national 
and European thought than the English Universities were 
ever asserted to be by their best friends or warmest admirers. 
