the room; and phonographic reports of all the lectures were printed and largely sold for a penny each at the door of the hall. This experiment was so successful that it was repeated in the following years; and when, in 1875, the first six series of lectures, in which many other most eminent scientific men had taken part, were published in three volumes under the supervision of Professor Roscoe, he was able to state that each lecture on the average during the six years had been attended by nearly one thousand persons, and that from five to ten thousand copies of the penny reports of each had been sold, while the demand for back numbers still continued.
The idea of educating the people, especially artisans, in science, is one which Professor Roscoe has held much at heart and on which he has spoken often and to the purpose. Yet he has not failed to see that the problem was a complicated one, surrounded by many difficulties, and that progress in solving it would have to be made deliberately and slowly. In 1871 he wrote in "Nature" concerning a proposition for the establishment of a national working-men's university, to be founded with special reference to instruction in those subjects which have a direct bearing on the arts and manufactures, recognizing the desirabilty of providing for instruction of the kind, but, foreseeing the danger of any attempt to secure it failing, through lack of means or want of good management. He estimated that an income of from £80,000 to £100,000 would be needed to support a people's university on a truly national scale, anything less than which would be a practical failure. But the financial difficulties, he added, were by no means the only or most important ones which would beset the new university. These would only begin to be felt when the scheme had been started—"such as dangers of giving an instruction too purely theoretic, or of running into the worse evil of teaching details without scientific aperçu.
A few years after this, we find him engaged in a discussion respecting the teaching of science in schools, in which he supported the position that no satisfactory advantage could accrue from this sort of instruction, until the subject was "placed upon its true position of educational equality both as regards range and time, with classics and mathematics, and no system of regulations or of examinations can be said to fulfill its object in which this position is ignored," "I am fully aware," he said, in another letter, "of the importance of a firm mathematical foundation, and I am far from wishing to overwhelm the younger boys with science before they have mastered the elements of arithmetic and grammar and languages. . . . The mistake, as it seems to me, which is prevalent respecting science-teaching in schools, is the notion that it is a subject to be lectured upon for two hours per week to those already educated, and who show an aptitude for it, while it can and ought to be introduced at a definite period as a regular part of school-work. It is now usually made an extra subject, a quasi-
