The inefficiency of the old universities is to a large extent the cause of the neglect and ignorance of science in the well-to-do class, who furnish the men who become Government officials of all kinds and members of professions which influence public opinion. But this inefficiency of the old universities is not due to their devotion to literary studies and to abstract science, nor to their objection to the pursuit of practical and commercial studies. That excuse is sometimes put forward for them, though at this moment they are, in fact, setting up laboratories and lecture-rooms for engineering, agriculture, forestry, mining, and such applications of science. Nor is it money which is really wanting at either Oxford or Cambridge, although they are both begging for it from the public. What Oxford and Cambridge want is not money but men; men as teachers—“professors” is the usual title given to them in a university—who must be the ablest, each in his own line, in the whole world. If such professors existed in either Oxford or Cambridge, and were allowed to teach, the town (if not the colleges!) would be full to overflowing of students—eager to pay their fees and to spend, not three short terms of seven weeks in each year, but the whole year, and many years, in the laboratories and lecture-rooms of those commanding men. To obtain such men—to set the machinery at work—you must pay them handsomely, and give them authority and the means of work. Once they were at work, the mere fees of the students would furnish a splendid revenue. There is plenty of money at Oxford and at Cambridge—a superabundance, in fact—which could and should be applied to this purpose, namely, that of securing and establishing there the greatest teachers in the world. The money is at present administered by the colleges according to the directions given in recent Acts of Parliament, and by no means in any blind obedience to the original intentions of the founders of the colleges. It is to a large extent wasted. That portion of it paid out as “scholarships” is for the most part wasted in bringing students to a place where they cannot get the best opportunities of study, and the rest is unwisely applied (not so much by the tenants for life or administrators of college funds as by rigid Act of Parliament) to providing an excessive number of totally inadequate salaries by which a corresponding number of young men are induced to enter upon the career of teachers as underpaid college Fellows. III DARWIN’S THEORY On Wednesday, the 1st of July 1908, half a century had passed since Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species was made known to the world. Fifty years have now been completed since that immortal book, _The Origin of Species_, was published, and a hundred years since Charles Darwin was born.