Considerable excitement prevails just now in many of our large towns in consequence of the needful, but somewhat troublesome, formalities required by law before any trade or handicraft may be exercised. Blacksmiths’ apprentices, we are told, very generally resent the necessity of passing their proper examinations in Metallurgy before they are qualified to shoe a horse; and the Artificial Flower Makers constantly evade attendance at the lectures on Botany, given expressly for their benefit. The candidates for licenses as Cabdrivers have more than once exhibited signs of discontent, when rejected on the grounds that they failed to answer some of the simplest examination questions on the principles of Mechanics applied to Traction, and on the correlation of Heat and Motion, as discovered by the illustrious author of “Heat as a Mode of Motion.” A strike (it is even rumoured) is impending among the stonemasons and bricklayers and slaters in a certain large city, because the Police, at the order of the Magistrates, having brought up several members of those trade-unions to the Local Examining Board for inquiry, it was elicited that none of them had acquired a competent knowledge of Geology in general, nor even of the formation of the strata of rocks wherewith their proper business is concerned. These difficulties were to be anticipated in the progress of Scientific knowledge among the masses, and we earnestly hope that no proposal to relax the late very wise legislation will be made in Parliament, but rather to reinforce the existing Acts by severer penalties upon ignorance and inattention. Who can for a moment think, for example, of allowing his shirt to be washed by a person who knows nothing of the chemistry of soap, blue, and starch? or his dinner cooked by a man who (however skilled in the mere kitchen art of sending up appetising dishes) is totally ignorant of how much albumen, salts, and alkalies go to the formation of vegetable and animal diet?