All we did at the beginning of the century was to found mechanics' institutions. They knew better in Prussia, "a bleeding and lacerated mass";[44] after Jena (1806), King Frederick William III and his councilors, disciples of Kant, founded the University of Berlin, "to supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." Among the universal poverty money was found for the Universities of Königsberg and Breslau, and Bonn was founded in 1818. As a result of this policy, carried on persistently and continuously by successive ministers, aided by wise councilors, many of them the products of this policy, such a state of things was brought about that not many years ago M. Ferdinand Lot, one of the most distinguished educationists of France, accorded to Germany "a supremacy in science comparable to the supremacy of England at sea." But this position has not been obtained merely by founding new universities. To Germany we owe the perfecting of the methods of teaching science. I have shown that it was in Germany that we find the first organized science teaching in schools. About the year 1825 that country made another tremendous stride. Liebig demonstrated that science teaching, to be of value, whether in the school or the university, must consist to a greater or less extent in practical work, and the more the better; that book work was next to useless. Liebig, when appointed to Giessen, smarting still under the difficulties he had had in learning chemistry without proper appliances, induced the Darmstadt Government to build a chemical laboratory in which the students could receive a thorough practical training. It will have been gathered from this reference to Liebig's system of teaching chemistry that still another branch of applied science had been created, which has since had a stupendous effect upon industry; and while Liebig was working at Giessen, another important industry was being created in England. I refer to the electric telegraph and all its developments, foreshadowed by Galileo in his reference to the "sympathy of magnetic needles." Not only then in chemistry, but in all branches of science which can be applied to the wants of man, the teaching must be practical--that is, the student must experiment and observe for himself, and he must himself seek new truths. It was at last recognized that a student could no more learn science effectively by seeing some one else perform an experiment than he could learn to draw effectively by seeing some one else make a sketch. Hence in the German universities the doctor's degree is based upon a research. Liebig's was the _fons et origo_ of all our laboratories--mechanical, metallurgical, chemical, physical, geological, astronomical, and biological.--_Nature._ [_To be continued._] FOOTNOTES: [33] An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October 6, 1898. [34] Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid, p. 2. Allman. [35] Inferno, canto iv, p. 130 _et seq._