results, or a labored repetition of hearsay statements. As an intellectual discipline, for facility of demonstration, for the simplicity of the objects, their beauty and interest, their associations with the green lanes and broad moors of England, with the poetry of "Cymbeline" and "Lycidas," with fairy tales and local folk-lore—botany is to my mind the branch of natural science which is above all others to be chosen where one only can be taught. Next in importance I would place elementary physics, the knowledge of the simplest laws of masses at rest and in motion, of heat and light. Its great recommendations are its precision, its constant and useful illustrations in daily life, the interest it gives to the handicrafts and manufactures in which so large a number of English boys and girls are busied, and the necessity of such knowledge as the first step in acquiring all other natural sciences.
First, then, I would that every Sheffield girl should love flowers with the deep and abiding affection of familiar knowledge, and that every Sheffield lad should know every common plant in your beautiful woods, and find his purest pleasure on the heights of Bell Hagg and the broad expanse of Stanage Moor. And next I would that your workmen and work-boys should know so much of mechanics that they may take an intelligent pride in your vast factories, and that in some of them may be awakened the genius to which we trust to repeat in future generations the national services of Arkwright, and Watt, and Stevenson.
With regard to the endowment of research in biology, I must confess that I should be sorry to see it undertaken by government funds. That such investigations are of public interest, that they are difficult and expensive, and that at present they languish for want of adequate support, is all true. But this country is not so poor, nor our countrymen so wanting in public spirit, that we need appeal to the national purse to supply every ascertained want. Great as is the national importance of science, the nation is more important still; and even if that were the alternative, I would rather that we should indefinitely continue dependent on Germany for our knowledge than give up the local energy, the unofficial zeal which has made England what she is. Far better for the strength and the civilization of the nation that a thousand pounds were raised every year for the endowment of unremunerative researches in this wealthy town of Sheffield than that ten thousand were paid you by a paternal monarch or an enlightened department.
But surely there is no need for us to go to Parliament for such sums as we require. In the first place, scientific men themselves show a good example of not asking before they give. There is the modest sum which we raise in this Association, there are the funds for helping research of the Royal Society, the Chemical Society, the British. Medical Association, the Iron and Steel Institute, the Whitworth
