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ANALYSES OF BOOKS. 
The Scientific Basis of National Progress, including that of 
Morality. By G. Gore, LL.D., F.R.S. London : Williams 
and Norgate. 
We have here an able and earnest plea for the furtherance of 
scientific research considered as the essential condition of na- 
tional progress. The author’s leading idea is that present know- 
ledge can merely enable us to maintain our present state, whilst 
any advance must be derived from new knowledge. Unless new 
discoveries are made, inventions and improvements must sooner 
or later cease. This idea, we think, must be in the main ac- 
cepted. It may indeed be contended that a portion of the know- 
ledge we at present possess is not utilised, and that, even when 
it has been brought into the tangible form of an improvement or 
invention, it may still remain for years a dead letter. With us, 
indeed, the inventor is in a painful dilemma. Let his device be 
never so clearly demonstrated, the mob of so-called practical 
men still hold back. If business is brisk — perhaps some of our 
readers may be able to carry their memories back to such a time 
— the average John Bull is apt to say that that there is no need 
of improvement, and that an economy of a few hundreds of 
pounds or a slight improvement in quality is not worth “bothering” 
about. On the other hand, when trade is slack no one has the 
courage to attempt any departure from established routine. Thus 
it often happens that the greater the essential value of any in- 
vention the greater is the difficulty of getting it taken up. We 
suspedt that the nations who are our chief industrial rivals do 
not take exacftly the same view of novelties. 
Dr. Gore works out his fundamental idea in four chapters, 
treating respectively of the scientific basis of material progress ; 
the scientific basis of mental and moral progress ; new truth, and 
its relation to human progress ; and, lastly, the promotion of 
original scientific research. “ The chief object of this book,” it 
is stated, “ is to disseminate more correct ideas respecting the 
importance of new positive knowledge, and the duties of society 
in relation to it ; and a further object is to assist in maintaining 
Birmingham in the front rank of intellectual, social, and moral 
advance!” We cannot read these lines without putting on 
record our sorrow that, at least as far as one science is concerned, 
Birmingham should have taken up a retrograde position, and that 
the trustees of Mason College should already, at the bidding of 
organised ignorance, have placed fetters upon an Institution 
opened with such high hopes and promises. We make these 
