being manufactured and consumed at a rate estimated at more than ten thousand millions daily. Much of the wealth of this country, resulting from science, has been very easily obtained by its possessors. That acquired by means of our coal has especially been obtained without commensurate effort. The amount of that substance raised in Great Britain during the year 1876 was 734 millions of tons. To draw upon a great stock of that mineral is like drawing money from a bank, because coal, unlike any other abundant substance (except wood and petroline), contains in itself an immense store of energy, which is evolved as heat during combustion, and may be utilized. Each piece of coal contains sufficient energy to lift its own weight twenty-three hundred miles, but it costs only a small proportion of that power to extract and raise it from the mine. I do not mean by these remarks to imply that the wealth accruing from this great store of power in coal is derived chiefly by the owners of coal mines. {30} This acquisition of wealth without commensurate sacrifice is not an unqualified advantage; it constitutes a debt to nature, which upon the great principle of causation, and of equivalency of action and reaction, must sooner or later be repaid. Judging from the infallibility of the action of those laws, and the signs of the times, this nation is now beginning to repay in the form of emigration of trade to other lands, and of relatively less rapid national advance, the debt incurred by undue pecuniary success. An excess of money or power obtained without equivalent effort, fails to properly develop the intelligence of its possessors, and nations have been hastened to ruin in this way. Our great success in getting money has attracted many from the pursuit of knowledge, and our love of knowledge has not increased as fast as our wealth. The wealth of the upper classes has, by decoying from study undisciplined young men at our old Universities, kept down the general standard of scientific instruction throughout the country, and, by leading to neglect of scientific research, is now retarding our progress in arts, manufactures, commerce, and civilization. The consequent relative poverty of the working classes is also producing similar effects by retarding education, and contributing towards the great deficiency of skilled labour, of which our inventors, manufacturers, and others so strongly complain in the working of their scientific processes. Had a just share of the great amount of money, gained by the application of science to useful {31} purposes, been applied to the payment and maintenance of scientific discoverers and inventors, as it should have been, the general standard of scientific education would have been higher, the poor would have had more employment and money, and the happiness and civilization of all would have been greater.