be made an object of profit than an hospitable, or a charitable establishment. Intellectual wants are at least as worthy of support as corporeal wants, and they ought to be provided for with the same feeling of nobleness and liberality. The language expected by the members of a scientific body from the directors ought not to be, ‘We have increased your property, we have raised the value of your shares.’ It ought rather to be, ‘We have endeavoured to apply your funds to useful purposes, to promote the diffusion of science, to encourage discovery, and to exalt the scientific glory of your country.’ “What this institution has done, it would ill become a person in my place to detail; but that it has tended to the progress of knowledge and invention, will not, I believe, be questioned. Compare the expenditure with the advantages. It would not support the least of your public amusements; and the income of an establishment, which, in its effects, may be said to be national, is derived from annual subscriptions scarcely greater than those which a learned professor of Edinburgh obtains from a single class.... “The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country. It is not so much by colonization that you have attained your preeminence or wealth, but by the cultivation of the riches of your own soil. Why, at this moment, are you able to supply the world with a thousand articles of iron and steel necessary for the purposes of life? It is by arts derived from chemistry and mechanics, and founded purely upon experiments. Why is the steam engine now carrying on operations which formerly employed, in painful and humiliating labour, thousands of our robust peasantry, who are now more nobly or more usefully serving their country either with the sword or with the plough? It was in consequence of experiments upon the nature of heat and pure physical investigations.