no signs of having heard what he said, while Lynn, as usual, smoked in his chair, saying nothing at all. For Lynn was one of those men who very seldom speak at all; and when they do, speak with more earnestness and energy than is generally heard.

Arthur, however, laughed; and the spectacles of Jones beamed gratefully on him.

"My cousin Philip," said Arthur, "started an infamous theory, some little time ago, that women prefer warmth to anything else in the world."

"Well," said Venn, "there may be something to be said for it. I believe that he is partly right. Women live in the house. Their ideas of life are those of the domestic circle. To have everything pleasant, comfortable, and elegant round them is quite a natural thing to desire. It is perhaps a brutal way of putting it, to say that they like to be warm. In the Chorus, we prefer a more indirect way of approaching a subject."

"Poor Phil takes direct views," said Arthur.

66

"Bring him here, and we will cure him," said Jones. On the subject of women there is nothing so elevated as the views of the Chorus-the Sophoclean Chorus. We are, if we are nothing else, Sophoclean in our views of love.

'Love, the unconquered, thou whose throne

Is on youth's fair and rounded cheek,,
Whom neither strong, nor brave, nor weak,
Can e'er escape-thee, thee we own.
Thou by thy master magic's aid

Cheatest keen eyes that else see well;
And o'er the loudest sniffing maid

Pourest the glamour of thy spell.

The nymph whose deepest, fondest prayer
Is for a sheltered nook and warm,
Glows with a thousand fancies rare,
Lit with thy pyrotechnic charm.'

"I suppose you will say that Sophocles wrote that?" growled Lynn.

"A free imitation only. It may, perhaps, in some points excel the original. I say nothing."

"They talk a great deal," said Lynn, breaking his usual silence, "of educating women, and making them less frivolous. Of course, the immediate result is to send them to the opposite extreme. Now, of all the odious women you can meet, give me the strong-minded."

"Do not give her to me," said Jones. "But it's all nonsense. They have made a college for them, and have Cambridge men |

there to teach them. In other words, they are going to make them second-rate scholars and third-rate mathematicians. What on earth is the use of that?"

"Is it," asked Venn, "the function of the Chorus to discuss female education?" "Why not?" returned Lynn. "By Jove! I've a good mind to have a vision too."

"Do," said Jones. "Two visions in the same evening is at least more than we could have expected."

Lynn smoked meditatively for a few mo

ments.

"I dreamed a dream," he began. "I thought that I stood in the world of the future-the future of a hundred years. Woman was emancipated, as they said. Every woman did, like all men do now, what was right in her own eyes. They could preach, teach, heal, practise law, live alone, and be as free as any man can be now."

sexes.

"Well ?" asked Jones, for Lynn stopped. "Well, I can't be as graphic as Venn was, because I have not the art of telling a story. I walked about the streets of London. I went into the houses, into the clubs, into the theatres-everywhere. The first thing that struck me was the entire mixture of the Women were everywhere. They drove cabs, they were markers at billiard tables, they kept shops, they plied trades, they were in the public offices-for everything was open to public competition. I talked to some of them. I found they were very much changed from what I remembered them. Not only were they coarse in appearance and manners, but they seemed to have lost the delicacy of woman's nature. The bloom was off the youngest of them. Men, too, had lost all their old deference and respect. There were none of the courtesies of life left; for the women had long since revolted against being considered the weaker sex. A new proverb had arisen-'The sixshooter makes all equal.' Every woman carried one, ostentatiously; not, I fancied, so much for self-protection as for purposes of attack. Their talk seemed loud and coarse, their jokes were club jokes, their stories were like those we hear on circuit and in messrooms. Their dress was altered, too. The old robes were discarded, and short kilts, with a tight-fitting jacket, seemed to be all the fashion. I asked my guide-did I say I had a guide?" "Was he an

"You did not," said Jones.

angel?"

"Of course I had an angel. I asked him -or her-if they were all married women? Marriage, she told me, had been abolished by a large majority of women, as contrary to the true spirit of liberty. This was directly against the wish of the men, who, it seemed, desired to retain the custom. As, however, the ceremony is one which requires the consent of two, it was abolished. Then the men turned sulky, and formed a kind of union, or guild, for the protection of the marriage laws. For a time it appeared as if the world would be depopulated, and the statistics of the Registrar showed a fallingoff in the number of births, which excited the gravest apprehensions. This league, however, fell to the ground from want of strength in the weaker brethren. After that all went well. The laws of property were altered, and an old law, belonging to an obscure Indian tribe in the Neilgherry Hills, was introduced. By virtue of this, property descended only through the mother. The interests of freedom were served, it is true; but it seemed to me as if there were some losses on the other hand, for all the men seemed dejected and lonely. There were no longer any high aims; no one looked for anything more than worldly advantage; no one dreamed of an impossible future, as we do now; there were no enthusiasts, no reformers, no religious thinkers, no great men. All was a dead level. I asked my guide if there were any exceptions-if what I saw really represented the actual world. She confessed it did; but she boasted, with pride, that the world was now reduced to a uniform mediocrity. No one looked for anything better, therefore no one tried for any thing better; no one praised anything good, therefore no one tried to do anything good; there were no prizes for excellence, therefore no one was excellent. But it all seemed dreary, stupid, and immoral as a modern music hall; and I awoke, glad to find that it was, after all, only a dream. I forgot to tell you that there were no wives-there were no families. Children were sent out to be nursed, and the necessity of labour on the part of the women necessitated the abolition of the maternal instinct."

"Is that all ?" asked Jones.

"It is," said Lynn; "and, before you make a rhyme about it-I can see you are meditating one-I just wish to state my moral. Women are only what their circle of men make them. If they are frivolous,

it is because the men are frivolous; if they are vain, it is because the men teach them vanity. But men have always to fall back upon their one great quality-their purity. Deference to a quality which they so seldom possess seems to me the truest safeguard for women, and the thing most likely to be a restraint upon men. restraint upon men. Education, emancipation, suffrage-it is all infernal humbug. We confuse words. We call that education which is only instruction; we call emancipation what is a departure from the natural order; we take woman from her own sphere and put her into ours, and then deplore the old subjection of the sex. Good God! sir-man is the nobler as well as the stronger. His function is to work—to do; to drag the world along, to fight against and keep down the great surging sea of sin and misery that grows with our civilization and keeps pace with our progress. But woman's function is to stand by and help; to train the children, to comfort the defeated, and succour the wounded. Why, in the name of all the all the saints, should she want to leave her own work and take ours?"

THE

STORY OF THE LABORATORIES

AT

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.

THE interesting and eventful history of the Royal Institution has lately been told by the treasurer to the society, Mr. William Spottiswoode. Such a narrative involves the recital of all the great scientific discoveries of Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, and Frankland, which have done so much for the advancement of knowledge, at the same time that they have made the institution famous. There is so much freshness and attractive simplicity in Mr. Spottiswoode's lecture, that we print it, in the assurance that it will please both the scientific and unscientific among our readers.

The treasurer of the Royal Institution said:

The first dawn of our history is to be sought among those stormy years with which the last century drew towards its close, and out of which many new thoughts and aspirations of men took their birth.

Its character, in accordance with the views of its early promoter, Count Rumford, was

at first far more industrial than it eventually became. Its two great objects were "the general diffusion of the knowledge of all new and useful improvements, and teaching the application of scientific discoveries to the improvement of arts and manufactures, and to the increase of domestic comfort and convenience." The institution was to contain models, or actual specimens of fireplaces and kitchen utensils for cottages, farmhouses, and large dwellings; a complete laundry for a gentleman's family, grates and chimneypieces, brewers' boilers, distillers' coppers, ventilators, lime-kilns, steam boilers, spinning wheels, agricultural implements, bridges, &c.; and at one time some eighteen or twenty young mechanics were actually boarded in the house.

From Count Rumford's final departure from England in 1802, we may date the decline of the industrial element; and from a report to the managers in 1803, it appears that, although chemistry had always been a primary object of the institution, yet from motives of economy, nothing more had been done in the way of either laboratory or apparatus than was necessary for the immediate purpose of the lectures. It was consequently proposed that the workshop should be added to the laboratory, and fitted with seats for 120 persons, and the forge adapted to chemical purposes. The report ends as follows:-"This laboratory will be equal, or indeed superior, to any in this country, and probably to any on the Continent."

It is interesting to contrast the verdict of 1873 with that of 1803. "Originally built," to quote Dr. Bence Jones's own words, a workshop for blacksmiths, fitted with a forge, and furnished with bellows, which only last summer left the institution, our chemical laboratory was probably the very worst in London."

Of the great names connected with this building, foremost in order of time, and very high in scientific rank, stands that of Dr. Thomas Young. His "Theory of Light and Colours" will always stamp him as one "whose genius has anticipated the progress of science," and whose reputation has risen as men have better understood his worth. His first paper on the subject was presented to the Royal Society in November, 1801. It is not too much to say of him, that without the wave theory of light (of which he was one of the prime and main founders) to serve as a guiding-thread through the labyrinth of phenomena, the long series of discoveries which have in this place culminated in those of Tyndall, in radiation and absorption, would have been impossible.

It is often remarked that little rills, which have threaded their way from distant mountains, ultimately discharge themselves as mighty streams into the sea. Yet, between these two stages, they flow quietly, but not therefore less usefully, past smiling meadows and the haunts of men. And here is a little scientific pastoral-if it may be so called-flowing out of the highest conceptions of the theory of undulations, and furnishing-to use his own words-a simple instrument "for measuring the diameters of the fibres of different kinds of wool." The King at this time had his flock of merino sheep, and Sir Joseph Banks had the care of them at Kew. On his recovery from his first mental attack, the King would only call the P. R. S. his woolstapler.

Our next name is that of Davy, an account of whose discoveries would require a volume, and a bare recital of them would be long.

The physical laboratory remained unchanged; and although Professor Tyndall, for himself, desired nothing more than to continue his researches in a place which his imagination filled with the recollections of his predecessors, he still acquiesced in the proposal for rebuilding, for the sake of his successors, and in the interest of the sister science of his colleague.

its rise.

The next five years of his life were devoted to experiments on polarity, and to other researches; and in 1811 he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Appreece; and in 1813, wrote to his brother, "In a few weeks I shall be able to return to my habits of study and research. I am going to be married to-morrow, and have a fair prospect of happiness with the most amiable and intellectual woman I have ever known." The issue of these hopes has been written by his biographers; but the disappointment of the last seventeen years of his life is illuminated by the invention, not less original in its conception than benevolent in its object, of the safety lamp.

The great value of this contrivance, and of questions arising out of it, will, I trust, be sufficient apology for diverging again from my story in order to mention some very important experiments now in progress by Mr. Galloway. Explosions, it is well known, occur even in cases where the safety lamp is used. And it has been noticed that in these cases they occur most frequently after the firing of a blasting shot in the neighbourhood; and as it was almost certain that the penetration of the fire-damp through the gauze of the lamp was not due to a sudden flow of gas from one part of the mine to another, experiments have been instituted to determine whether the transmission of the sound wave, or wave of compression, may not have been the means of producing the mischief.

Of the next great name connected with our institution—namely, Michael Faradayof his life and his discoveries, the history has been already written-so far, indeed, as it can be written by Bence Jones, by Tyndall, and by Gladstone. His volumes of notes, from 1831 to 1856, will give some idea of the amount of work which he did in our laboratory; and their value will be better appreciated through the consideration that, before these notes were made, no less than sixty of his scientific papers had been printed, nine of them in the "Philosophical Transactions."

For our present purpose it will be sufficient to say that the entire fabric of those brilliant and manifold contributions to human knowledge were wrought out within the walls of the Royal Institution.

Professor Frankland before coming to us had isolated the compound radicals methyl, ethyl, and amyl, and had proved their re

semblance to hydrogen. He had also combined them with the metals zinc, tin, mercury, and boron. By this means he had obtained a very powerful chemical reagent, which proved of eminent service in subsequent operations. An instance of its power will be found in zinc-ethyl, which, by its rapid combination with oxygen of the air, bursts into spontaneous combustion as soon as a flask containing it is opened.

In 1866, Dr. Frankland determined, by a long series of calorimetric experiments, the maximum amount of force capable of being developed by given weights of the different foods commonly used by men.

In 1867, he investigated the effect of pressure (up to 20 atmospheres) upon the luminosity of flames of hydrogen and of carbonic oxides. He found that these flames, so feebly luminous at ordinary atmospheric pressure, burn with brilliant light under pressures from 10 to 20 atmospheres, and that the spectra of these brilliant flames is perfectly continuous. From the latter circumstance he infers that solar light may be derived from glowing gas, and not from incandescent solid or liquid matter.

These researches were suggested by an old experiment of Cavendish's, in which he exploded a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, first under atmospheric pressure, and then under a pressure of from 10 to 12 atmospheres. In the first case there is much noise and little light; in the second, a brilliant flash and no noise. The labours of Dr. Frankland have rendered this experiment intelligible, and have correlated it with other phenomena.

Of Faraday's successor, John Tyndall, I am greatly at a loss how to speak. In this place his presence seems so near to us, his thoughts so subtle, his words-even when rung back to us from those busy cities far away on the other side of the Atlantic-so familiar and yet so stirring, that it behoves us that ours should be wary and few. Few men have brought so large a burden and bulk of contribution to the common stock of knowledge; but still fewer have inspired in his hearers so strong a love, such ardent enthusiasm, for the subjects of his research.

It is now twenty years since Professor Tyndall began his researches in our laboratory. During the first thirteen years he produced no less than thirteen papers, which were printed in the "Philosophical Transactions": on Sound, on Diamagnetism, on

Glaciers and Ice, on the Radiation and Absorption of Heat, and on Calorescence.

In these he established the important fact that if the various gases be arranged in order according to their power, first of radiating heat, and secondly of absorbing radiant heat, the order will be the same in both cases. He further proved that the chief absorbing action of our atmosphere on nonluminous heat is due to its aqueous vapour. He applied his discovery to the explanation of many meteorological facts: e. g., the great daily range of the thermometer in dry climates; the production of frost at night in the Sahara; the cold in the table-lands of Asia, &c.

He discovered also the means of separating the invisible from the visible radiations, and proved that in the case of the electric light the former is no less than eight times as powerful as the latter. He also made the daring experiment of placing his eye at a focus of dark rays capable of heating platinum to redness.

Since 1866 his attention has been largely occupied in examining the action of heat of high refrangibility-instead of low-as an explorer of the molecular condition of

matter.

In this investigation one obstacle to be overcome was the presence of the floating matter in the air. The processes of removal of these particles became the occasion of an independent research, branching out into various channels; on the one hand, it dealt with the very practical problem of the preservation of life among firemen exposed to heated smoke; and, on the other, it approached the recondite question of spontaneous generation.

He subjected the compound vapours of various substances to the action of a concentrated beam of light. The vapours were decomposed, and non-volatile products were formed. The decompositions always began with a blue cloud, which discharged perfectly polarized light at right angles to the beam. This suggested to him the origin of the blue colour of the sky; and as it showed the extraordinary amount of light that may be scattered by cloudy matter of extreme tenuity, he considered that it might be regarded as a suggestion towards explaining the nature of a comet's tail.

[The lecturer then exhibited the polarization of light scattered by small particles

suspended in the medium traversed by a beam from the electric lamp, employing for the purpose the chromatic effects due to the circular polarization of quartz.]

His volume of contributions to molecular physics in the domain of radiant heat, which contains only his original investigations on this subject, would alone suffice to show what is doing in the laboratory of our institution.

If we compare him to Faraday at the same time of his life, he has still many years of intellectual energy, the conversion of which into its scientific equivalent may, perhaps, be effected within these walls.

No one has regretted the destruction of the laboratory of Davy and Faraday more than Professor Tyndall. He almost prayed for the preservation of the place where their discoveries had been made; but as soon as he saw that in our struggle for existence such material aids as improved buildings would conduce alike to the progress of science and to the permanence of the institution, he withdrew his objections, and threw all his powers into making the new laboratories as perfect as possible for the good of his successors.

I add a few words on the reasons which led the managers to recommend the rebuilding of our laboratories, and the consequent demolition of the place where the great discoveries that I have touched upon were made. In the opinion of those best qualified to judge, our chemical laboratory was badly ventilated, badly lighted, badly drained, and quite unfit to be occupied for many hours daily. It was probably the very worst, and certainly all but the worst, chemical laboratory in London; and compared with more modern ones, both at home and abroad, it was nowhere. The physical laboratory had remained for nearly seventy years in its original state. At first it was said to be equal to any laboratory; but then there were hardly any in existence in this country; and during the last few years such splendid edifices have arisen in London, in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Manchester, and in Glasgow, and elsewhere, that the laboratory of Davy, of Faraday, and of Tyndall, was much inferior to the private laboratories of the professors who carry on their course of instruction in public rooms of still greater size and extent of resource. The main purpose of our laboratories is research, and