question, "Pourquoi la France n'a pas trouvé d'hommes supérieurs au moment du péril ?" The general answer was because France had allowed university education to sink to a low ebb. Before the great Revolution France had twenty-three autonomous universities in the provinces. Napoleon desired to found one great university at Paris, and he crushed out the others with the hand of a despot, and remodelled the last with the instincts of a drill-sergeant. The central university sank so low that in 1868 it is said that only £8,000 were spent for true academic purposes. Startled by the intellectual sterility shown in the war, France has made gigantic efforts to retrieve her position, and has rebuilt the provincial colleges at a cost of £3,280,000, while her annual budget for their support now reaches half a million pounds. In order to open these provincial colleges to the best talent of France, more than five hundred scholarships have been founded, of an annual cost of £30,000. France now recognizes that it is not by the number of men under arms that she can compete with her great neighbor Germany, so she has determined to equal her in intellect. You will understand why it is that Germany was obliged, even if she had not been willing, to spend such large sums in order to equip the university of her conquered province, Alsace-Lorraine. France and Germany are fully aware that science is the source of wealth and power, and that the only way of advancing it is to encourage universities to make researches and to spread existing knowledge through the community. Other European nations are advancing on the same lines. Switzerland is a remarkable illustration of how a country can compensate itself for its natural disadvantages by a scientific education of its people. Switzerland contains neither coal nor the ordinary raw materials of industry, and is separated from other countries which might supply them by mountain-barriers. Yet, by a singularly good system of graded schools, and by the great technical college of Zürich, she has become a prosperous manufacturing country. In Great Britain we have nothing comparable to this technical college, either in magnitude or efficiency. Belgium is reorganizing its universities, and the state has freed the localities from the charge of buildings, and will in future equip the universities with efficient teaching resources out of public taxation. Holland, with a population of four million, and a small revenue of £9,000,000, spends £136,000 on her four universities. Contrast this liberality of foreign countries in the promotion of higher instruction with the action of our own country. Scotland, like Holland, has four universities, and is not very different from it in population, but it only receives £30,000 from the state. By a special clause in the Scotch Universities Bill the Government asked Parliament to declare that under no circumstances should the parliamentary grant be ever increased above £40,000. According to the views of the British Treasury, there is a finality in science and in expanding knowledge. The wealthy Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are gradually constructing laboratories for science. The merchant princes of Manchester have equipped their new Victoria University with similar laboratories. Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have also done so, partly at the cost of Government and largely by private subscriptions. The poorer Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews are still inefficiently provided with the modern appliances for teaching science. London has one small Government college and two chartered colleges, but is wholly destitute of a teaching university. It would excite great astonishment at the Treasury if we were to make the modest request that the great metropolis, with a population of four million, should be put into as efficient academical position as the town of Strasburg, with 104,000 inhabitants, by receiving, as that town does, £43,000 annually for academic instruction and £700,000 for university buildings. Still, the amazing anomaly that London has no teaching university must ere long cease. It is a comforting fact that, in spite of the indifference of Parliament, the large towns of the kingdom are showing their sense of the need of higher education. Manchester has already its university. Nottingham, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bristol have colleges more or less complete. Liverpool converts a disused lunatic asylum into a college for sane people. Cardiff rents an infirmary for a collegiate building. Dundee, by private benefaction, rears a Baxter College with larger ambitions. All these are healthy signs that the public are determined to have advanced science-teaching, but the resources of the institutions are altogether inadequate to the end in view. Even in the few cases. where the laboratories are efficient for teaching purposes, they are inefficient as laboratories for research. Under these circumstances the Royal Commission on Science advocates special Government laboratories for research. Such laboratories, supported by public money, are as legitimate subjects for expenditure as galleries for pictures or sculpture; but I think that they would not be successful, and would injure science if they failed. It would be safer in the mean time if the state assisted universities or well-established colleges to found laboratories of research under their own care. Even such a proposal shocks our Chancellor of the Exchequer, who tells us that this country is burdened with public debt, and has ironclads to build and arsenals to provide. Nevertheless our wealth is proportionally much greater than that of foreign states which are competing with so much vigor in the promotion of higher education. They deem such expenditure to be true economy, and do not allow their huge standing armies to be an apology for keeping their people backward in the march of knowledge. France, which in the last ten years has been spending a million. annually on university education, had a war indemnity to pay, and competes successfully with this country in ironclads. Either all foreign. states are strangely deceived in their belief that the competition of the world has become a competition of intellect, or we are marvelously unobservant of the change which is passing over Europe in the higher education of the people. Preparations for war will not insure to us the blessings and security of an enlightened peace. Protective expenditure may be wise, though productive expenditure is wiser. "Were half the powers which fill the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, There were no need of arsenals and forts." Universities are not mere storehouses of knowledge; they are also conservatories for its cultivation. In Mexico there is a species of ant which sets apart some of its individuals to act as honey-jars by monstrously extending their abdomens to store the precious fluid till it is wanted by the community. Professors in a university have a higher function, because they ought to make new honey as well as to store it. The widening of the bounds of knowledge, literary or scientific, is the crowning glory of university life. Germany unites the functions of teaching and research in the universities, while France keeps them in separate institutions. The former system is best adapted to our habits, but its condition for success is that our science-chairs should be greatly increased, so that teachers should not be wholly absorbed in the duties of instruction. Germany subdivides the sciences into various chairs, and gives to the professors special laboratories. It also makes it a condition for the higher honors of a university that the candidates shall give proofs of their ability to make original researches. Under such a system, teaching and investigation are not incompatible. In the evidence before the Science Commission many opinions were given that scientific men engaged in research should not be burdened with the duties of education, and there is much to be said in support of this view when a single professor for the whole range of physical science is its only representative in a university. But I hope that such a system will not long continue, for if it do we must occupy a very inferior position as a nation in the intellectual competition of Europe. Research and education in limited branches of higher knowledge are not incompatible. It is true that Galileo complained of the burden imposed upon him by his numerous astronomical pupils, though few other philosophers have echoed this complaint. Newton, who produced order in worlds, and Dalton, who brought atoms under the reign of order and number, rejoiced in their pupils. Lalande spread astronomers as Liebig spread chemists, and Johannes Müller biologists, all over the world. Laplace, La Grange, Dulong, Gay-Lussac, Berthollet, and Dumas, were professors as well as discoverers in France. In England our discoverers have generally been teachers. In fact, I recollect only three notable examples of men who were not-Boyle, Cavendish, and Joule. It was so in ancient as well as in modern times, VOL. XXVIII.-4 for Plato and Aristotle taught and philosophized. If you do not make the investigator a schoolmaster, as Dalton was, and as practically our professors are at the present time, with the duty of teaching all branches of their sciences, the mere elementary truths as well as the highest generalizations being compressed into a course, it is well that they should be brought into contact with the world in which they live, so as to know its wants and aspirations. They could then quicken the pregnant minds around them, and extend to others their own power and love of research. Goethe had a fine perception of this when he "Wer in der Weltgeschichte lebt, wrote: Wer in die Zeiten schaut, und strebt, Nur der ist werth, zu sprechen und zu dichten." Our universities are still far from the attainment of a proper combination of their resources between teaching and research. Even Oxford and Cambridge, which have done so much in recent years in the equipment of laboratories and in adding to their scientific staff, are still far behind a second-class German university. The professional faculties of the English universities are growing, and will diffuse a greater taste for science among their students, though they may absorb the time of the limited professoriate so as to prevent it advancing the boundaries of knowledge. Professional faculties are absolutely essential to the existence of universities in poor countries like Scotland and Ireland. This has been the case from the early days of the Bologna University up to the present time. Originally universities arose not by mere bulls of popes, but as a response to the strong desire of the professional classes to dignify their crafts by real knowledge. If their education had been limited to mere technical schools, like the Medical School of Salerno, which flourished in the eleventh century, length but not breadth would have been given to education. So the universities wisely joined culture to the professional sciences. Poor countries like Scotland and Ireland must have their academic systems based on the professional faculties, although wealthy universities like Oxford and Cambridge may continue to have them as mere supplements to a more general education. A greater liberality of support on the part of the state in the establishment of chairs of science, for the sake of science and not merely for the teaching of the professions, would enable the poorer universities to take their part in the advancement of knowledge. I have already alluded to the foundation of new colleges in different parts of the kingdom. Owens College has worthily developed into the Victoria University. Formerly she depended for degrees on the University of London. No longer will she be like a moon reflecting cold and sickly rays from a distant luminary, for in future she will be a sun, a center of intelligence, warming and illuminating the regions around her. The other colleges which have formed themselves in large manufacturing districts are remarkable expressions from them that science must be promoted. Including the colleges of a high class, such as University College and King's College in London, and the three Queen's Colleges in Ireland, the aggregate attendance of students in colleges without university rank is between nine and ten thousand, while that of the universities is fifteen thousand. No doubt some of the provincial colleges require considerable improvement in their teaching methods; sometimes they unwisely aim at a full university curriculum when it would be better for them to act as faculties. Still they are all growing in the spirit of self-help, and some of them are destined, like Owens College, to develop into universities. This is not a subject of alarm to lovers of education, while it is one of hope and encouragement to the great centers of industry. There are too few autonomous universities in England in proportion to its population. While Scotland, with a population of 3,750,000, has four universities with 6,500 students, England, with twenty-six million people, has only the same number of teaching universities with six thousand students. Unless English colleges have such ambition, they may be turned into mere mills to grind out material for examinations and competitions. Higher colleges should always hold before their students that knowledge, for its own sake, is the only object worthy of reverence. Beyond college-life there is a land of research flowing with milk and honey for those who know how to cultivate it. Colleges should at least show a Pisgah view of this land of promise, which stretches far beyond the Jordan of examinations and competitions. TWO WONDERFUL INSTRUMENTS. BY ALBERT LEFFING WELL, M. D. THE most wonderful or existing in, it, HE eye is the most wonderful organ existing in the higher forms of animal life. It is the window of the brain; through it, the creature obtains knowledge of that which lies beyond the reach of its other senses. But there is really nothing very mysterious about the structure of the eye when considered as an optical instrument. It is simply a tiny chamber, with one little window through which light passes, making a reversed picture upon the wall beyond. The same effect may be obtained by a lens so fixed in the window of a darkened room that the only light from without must pass through it. As in the illustration we present herewith, the picture of the scene without, the peasant-girl afoot, the rustic laborer, the thatched cottage-all appear on the screen in the dark chamber, but reversed in position. The same effect is produced by the eye. The eyeball is a little |