The fundamental object in founding State laboratories should be to keep a staff of the most competent men wholly engaged in original research in pure science, and a secondary object might be to train assistants to become investigators. Such laboratories would doubtless be located in London, and be on a scale of magnitude creditable to science and the nation. They might very suitably include {191} departments for the simpler pure sciences and even for biology. It is manifest that the arguments which support the proposition for professorships of original research in those sciences apply in a greater or less degree to other sciences; and it has been stated that "there is no ground upon which the scheme can be limited to the subject of natural philosophy." In reference to this remark, (which, like most objections, contains some truth), it must be remembered that there is a natural order of dependence of the sciences upon each other, in which order also they are being evolved. It is a general truth that the physical sciences of light and heat are based upon mechanical conditions of the particles of matter; that the science of chemistry is founded upon physics; that biological phenomena are dependent upon physical and chemical conditions; that psychological subjects are based upon biology; and that biological science cannot progress excepting in proportion to the advance of the sciences on which it is based. In addition to this general order of precedence of evolution in point of time, the various sciences are so mutually related that all must advance together, the simple ones taking the lead, and the concrete and more complex sciences, with their attendant arts, following behind. As this natural order of dependence and development of the sciences is a great fact of nature, over which we have little or no control, and as a scheme for the simultaneous establishment of professorships of research in all the sciences, simple, complex, and {192} concrete, would probably be too great an undertaking, the most proper course would be to commence with the simpler ones, such as those of mathematics, mechanics, physics, and chemistry, and perhaps biology. If it be argued that it would be unadvisable to commence with the simple and purely experimental sciences, it would be still more unadvisable to commence with the concrete subjects of "natural history, medicine, civil history, law, and theology," or with the arts which also depend upon science.