310 JOURNAL OP THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
servations of many workers under the eye of the whole scientific 
world ; while societies, institutions, provincial, national, and even 
international, afford special opportunities for stimulating zeal, and 
bringing to a focus the scattered rays of truth. Although the 
educational arrangements of the country are far behind what the 
best of scientific workers believe to be desirable, yet they are 
being largely modified to meet the demands of Science. The 
conservatism of our older universities has at length yielded in some 
degree to the pressure of the age in this respect. As an illustration 
of the remarkable subdivision of research in the higher depart- 
ments of Science, it may be mentioned that in the University of 
London Examinations for the degree of Doctor of Science an 
option is given of sixteen distinct subjects. In the new colleges 
at Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Birmingham, Bristol, 
Cardiff, as at Kensington, and in most of the middle class 
schools, special provision is made for scientific subjects, and, in 
some cases, prominence is given to them. A periodical and 
standard literature has arisen in connection with almost every 
division and subdivision of the abstract and applied sciences, as 
also with those concerned with the origin and constitution of 
forms of animate and inanimate matter « and lectures, both 
exoteric and esoteric, are of daily occurrence in college, hall, or 
school. The widespread interest created by the controversies 
connected with the Darwinian theory of the origin of species, 
combined with the natural concern men have in what comes so 
near to themselves as anthropology, has aroused many to consider 
questions which otherwise would have been relegated to the 
leisure of the gifted few ; and the great and ever increasing 
obligations under which commerce, domestic life, medicine, the 
arts of peace and of war, are laid to modern discoveries, together 
with the vague notion entertained by minds more sanguine 
perhaps than prophetic, that the golden age of civilization is 
therefore nigh at hand, — these things, I say, have tended to 
raise in the regard of multitudes that branch of Science usually 
known as Physical, to the foremost position as being a trainer 
of the intellect, a material benefactor to the rich and the poor, 
a revealer of truth, and possibly, in due time, a clue to life's 
mysteries. 
But the fact of the prevalence of scientific studies and provision 
for the extension of scientific knowledge is one thing, the preva- 
