One word more. On the Continent of Europe, kings had been the nursing fathers and queens the nursing mothers of science; while republican governments were not a whit behind in the liberality of their subventions to scientific education. In England we had nothing of this kind, and to establish an equivalent state of things we had to appeal, not to the Government, but to the people. They have been roused by making the most recondite discoveries of science the property of the community at large. And as a result of this stirring of the national pulse—this development of self-reliance—we see schools, colleges, and universities now rising in our midst, which promise by-and-by to rival those of Germany in number and importance.
It is time that I should cease; but, before doing so, I would ask—as they do in the House of Commons—permission to say a word in personal explanation. I have climbed some difficult mountains in my time, and after strenuous effort for a dozen hours or more upon ice, rock, and snow, I have not unfrequently reached the top. I question whether there is a joy on earth more exhilarating than that of the mountaineer, who, having achieved his object, is able to afford himself, upon the summit, a foaming bumper of champagne. But, my lords and gentlemen, the hardest climb, by far, that I have ever accomplished, was that from the banks of the Barrow to the banks of the Thames—from the modest Irish roof under which I was born to Willis's Rooms. Here I have reached my mountain-top, and you—God bless you!—have given me a bumper which no scientific climber ever before enjoyed.
AFTER-SPEECHES.
Sir Frederick Pollock, in proposing the toast of "Literature and Art," said that on most occasions similar to the present one this toast was a triple one, and included the three sisters—Science, Literature, and Art. But this evening they were assembled together to do homage to science, in the person of one of its most distinguished votaries, and for the time the room in which they had met became a temple of science. In such a temple the principal figure, standing upon the pedestal appropriated to the presiding goddess, must be that of Science, and to her due rites had been already rendered. But for the sisters, Literature and Art, room must be found also in the sacred edifice; they too must have their altars and their shrines. He pointed out that the highest powers of the imagination were required by the man of science, as well as by the poet and the painter, and instanced the prediction by Fresnel of the bright spot in the center of the shadow of a disk; and the suggestion made to Goethe of his theory of the development of the vertebrate skeleton, by his accidental observation of the scattered fragments of the deer's skull lying in his path. He adduced the names of Aristotle, Bacon, and other great men who had connected literature with science; and instanced Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Christopher Wren, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
