The spirit of the place may be summed up very briefly. It has existed for a century as the home of the highest kind of scientific research, and of the best and most specialised kind of scientific lectures. It was here that Davy first showed the electric arc lamp; that he astonished the world by decomposing potash and producing potassium; that he invented the safety lamp. It was here that Faraday worked and laboured for nearly fifty years. Here that Tyndall’s investigations on radiant heat and diamagnetism were carried on. Here that Brande, Frankland, Odling, Gladstone, and Dewar have handed on the torch of chemistry from the time of Davy. Professorships, of which the educational duties are restricted to a few lectures in the year, giving leisure and scope for research as the main duty, are not to be found anywhere else in the British Islands; those at colleges and universities being invariably hampered with educational and administrative duties. [Sidenote: ROYAL INSTITUTION LABORATORIES.] As for the lectures at the Royal Institution, they may be divided under three heads: the afternoon courses; the juvenile lectures at Christmas; the Friday night discourses. The afternoon lectures are thrice a week at three o’clock, and consist usually of short courses, from three lectures to as many as twelve, by eminent scientific and literary men. Invariably one of these courses during the season, either before or after Easter, is given by one of the regular Professors; the remaining lecturers are paid professional fees in proportion to the duration of their course. The Christmas lectures, always six in number, are given, sometimes by one of the Professors, sometimes by outside lecturers of scientific reputation. But the Friday night discourses, given at nine o’clock, during the season from January till June, are unique. No fee is paid to the lecturer, save a contribution toward expenses if applied for, and it is considered to be a distinct honour to be invited to give such a discourse. There is no scientific man of any original claim to distinction; no chemist, engineer, or electrician; no physiologist, geologist, or mineralogist, during the last fifty years, who has not been invited thus to give an account of his investigations. Occasionally a wider range is taken, and the eminent writer of books, dramatist, metaphysician, or musician has taken his place at the lecture-table. The Friday night gathering is always a brilliant one. From the _salons_ of society, from the world of politics and diplomacy, as well as from the ranks of the learned professions and of the fine arts, men and women assemble to listen to the exposition of the latest discoveries or the newest advances in philosophy by the men who have made them. Every discourse must, so far as the subject admits, be illustrated in the best possible way by experiments, by diagrams, by the exhibition of specimens. Not infrequently, the person invited to