Essays and addresses / by professors and lectures of the Owens College, Manchester.

Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays and addresses / by professors and lectures of the Owens College, Manchester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    60/584 page 39
    п.] AS А MEANS OF ED UCA TION. 39 this mainspring of progress, and in honouring those whose Hves are devoted to this high calling. Indeed, we may look forward in this direction with confi¬ dence to the establishment of a better state of things. Many of the active-minded amongst university men are fully alive to the necessity of such a change, and already both Oxford and Cambridge have made preparations in the foundation of laboratories, as in¬ stanced by the noble gift of the Cavendish Labora¬ tory by his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, in which the study of the physical sciences can properly be carried to the highest point. With men like Adams, Foster, Maxwell, and Stokes, at Cambridge, and Clifton, Odling,. and Rolleston, at Oxford, surely something ought to be accomplished in the vitalization of the sleepy hollow into which, as regards independent scientific investiga¬ tion, the Universities (with a few great and honourable exceptions) have fallen. The difficulties, however, which those who wish to place physical science in its true position in the Universities have to overcome are extremely great ; the prestige of a system which has been going on for generations cannot be easily altered or destroyed ; even now it is to be feared that the con¬ ceptions respecting the value of scientific studies, and of the abilities of those who devote themselves to these subjects, held amongst the mass of the Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates are of the falsest and most ignorant kind. Nor is it difficult to see the cause of this want of appreciation of the scientific habit of mind, coming, as a large proportion of those entering the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge do, from the great public schools, where the whole system is one in which
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