of our permissive bill, I would strongly advocate that over the whole of the United Kingdom the Health Acts should be made practically imperative in all populous places. In some districts, the introduction of water, and the providing of proper drainage, might entail too heavy a burden on the small community; but I would provide for that by placing a limit on the amount of assessment, and wherever the rate exceeded a given sum, at the utmost two shillings per pound of rental for all sanitary measures, then I would hold it right and proper that the county should be assessed for everything above that rate. The health of the county is dependent to a great extent on the health of its townships, and may frankly contribute to the sanitary improvement of such.

In concluding, I wish I could prevail upon the Royal Scottish Society of Arts to frame a memorial on the subject of our Health Acts being made peremptory, and thus assist in carrying out practically the suggestion of our Patroness, the Queen.*

On the Value of a National System of Technical Education. By JOHN SCOTT RUSSELL, Esq., Vice-President of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Being an abstract of a discourse delivered at the Conversazione of the Society, held in the Museum of Science and Art, on 24th January 1867. Awarded the special thanks of the Society.

You will readily imagine that when I accepted the invitation to meet you here, on the occasion of this my longpromised visit to this city, it was impossible for me not to accept with heartfelt pleasure the opportunity of meeting again so many old friends and fellow-workers, and to join once more my efforts to yours in promoting the diffusion of

* Since the above paper was read before the Society, Parliament has passed a Health Bill for Scotland, entitled " The Public Health (Scotland) Act, 1867," which gives increased powers to the Board of Supervision, and places it within the grasp of the minority of the householders in a populous place to enforce sanitary clauses for drainage, water supply, and the regulating of lodging-houses. This Act was passed on the 15th August 1867, and came into operation on the 1st day of November, and the provisions of the Bill render health measures practically compulsory in Scotland.

scientific knowledge, and in encouraging and helping its successful applications to all those practical arts, occupations, professions, and industries which feed the commerce and occupy the people of this mercantile country, and which are so rapidly and on so gigantic a scale accelerating the civilisation of mankind. For no less than forty years you and I have been labouring together in this great work of applying science to the advancement of the uses and destinies of our fellow-men. And although I have now been absent from among you for near thirty years, I feel it to be a real pleasure to find that we have not been changed by time in our views of the duties of life; that you still prosecute successfully your efforts to educate and to advance society; and that you still feel, as I do, that scientific knowledge has been conferred on society as a great boon from God, and that its purpose is to enable men to employ all the great and long-hidden powers of nature for the advancement of the human race, and for the purpose of rendering them more intelligent, more refined, abler, wiser, happier, better than they have been in the earlier, ruder stages of society. I join with you, therefore, this evening with great satisfaction in adding my feeble co-operation to yours. It is only an act of gratitude to you to give you the aid of my best thoughts, for it was in the rooms of your Society that, some forty years ago, I read my first paper, on the "Application of Science to some of the Engineering Arts," and it was the great kindness with which you then viewed my first efforts that much encouraged me to devote ever since then all my leisure from specific duties to efforts for the advancement of knowledge, to the practical education of the people, and to the application of abstract science to the realities of life. When I left Edinburgh, it was to undertake at Greenock the construction of steam-engines and steamships on a large scale, such as formerly I had only made on a very small one. The experience I gained there enabled me afterwards in England to design and construct such vessels on a scale, of a power, with a speed, and with perfections such as in old times we never dreamed of. But I frankly confess to you that it is to the early lessons.

of science I had the pleasure to learn in your Universities, to the early applications which I learned here to make of abstract truth to the control, organisation, and direction of matter, of power, and of motion, that I owe any success which I may have had in wielding the great powers of nature, and applying them to human use. The benefits I myself, therefore, derived from technical education and practical training in my youth here, I am desirous to see extended to the generation now about to succeed us in the field of active industry. I am glad to find that the Society of Arts has not slacked its efforts, but has now increasing prosperity and influence, which it is using for important ends. I view with especial pleasure the connection of the Society of Arts with this great Technical Museum, because I see in that a new link uniting science with the practical social well-being of the community,-education through the eye of a more powerful, more rapid engine of popular education than by sounds through the ear. You may try hard to make a man understand a new sort of steam-engine, or cannon, or telescope, by talking to him, or telling him all about it in a book; but show him the thing itself, or its copy in little. Do as Mr Archer has done here. Give him not only the thing itself, but a section through the middle of it, so as to show him all its secret structure; in short, turn it inside out, as I have to-day seen done in this Museum, and your young mechanic educates himself in a manner infinitely better than words can tell. Or, if it be a process of manufacture you want to teach him, here is the whole process laid out before him so clearly as to tell the whole story by a kind of pantomime; for there the rude piece of iron or steel can be seen turning out of the rude ore, going through Protean metamorphoses, and at last coming out something utterly unlike the form, shape, colour, property, and power to the rude stuff it started out of. Matter itself here speaks that primitive tongue of pantomime which all can comprehend, and speaks home through eye to mind. But although the mere seeing of things here does much important good to the industrious thinker, it will neither answer the multitude of questions which the very sight raises in his mind,

nor will it reveal to him the hidden causes which underlie and create the marvels of industry. The young race who follow us have not only to see how things are done, but to do them; not only to understand things, but to invent them, and make them, and send them out into the world, and put them to work where they are wanted. I rejoice, therefore, to find that you have not erected this great practical collection as a separate and detached institution, but have attached it, as an associate and supplementary institution, to the adjacent institution—our noble, time-honoured, beloved University. I rejoice that that University cherishes, encourages, and fosters this younger institution; that it has deposited many of its ancient valued treasures here, and that the chasm from science to practice is bridged over to join the edifice of the Philosophical University to the edifice of the Technical Museum, so that the student who has studied principles there may see their applications here; and so that the visitor to the Museum, who finds himself unable to comprehend the marvels of the Museum, may go as a pupil to the University, and find there his ignorance illuminated, his doubts resolved by science. I congratulate you, therefore, both as citizens of Edinburgh, as members of this Society, and as old students like myself, and members of the University, on having so closely attached modern art and industry to ancient learning and philosophy. But although what Edinburgh has thus accomplished is admirable, we must still be asking ourselves whether there be not something more which ought to be done, which is wanted, and which the Society of Arts, the University, and the citizens of Edinburgh might advantageously undertake and carry out, for the completion of the great purpose of educating and of training the next generation of skilled working men. By working men I mean all those men who have to deal with the material world-I mean the working men, as distinguished from the merely thinking, writing, teaching men, though their mental work is often harder, more laborious, more valuable than ours. But for our purposes, I mean by "working men" those who have to go into life in order to wrestle with dead matter, have to try

2z

VOL. VII.

their strength with iron and steel, and rock and water; who have to overcome the inertia of dead matter, to conquer the resistance of materials, to hew rocks and make them into houses, cities, roads, and bridges; who have to struggle with masses of iron and steel, and stretch and twist and coil and draw them out into railways, and wheels, and plates, and ships, and guns; who have to take their skill and knowledge down into the bowels of the earth, and there, without the light of sun or the breath of heaven, have to tear out of their dark recesses the millions of mineral wealth which thousands of years ago the all-seeing, foreseeing God carefully stored up there, ready to reward the toil, the science, and the skill of the adventurous skilled generations which He knew would one day turn to good use the debris of former worlds-which He knew would one day be wanted by that race of instructed men who would one day diffuse the blessings of Christianity, civilisation, and science over the earth's surface. These I call working men, and those also I call working men whose skill and study it is to find out in different lands, under different climates, what are the productions in which one country is poor and another rich, and who, on opposite sides of the globe, ask one nation by telegraph what it wants, and tell them back by telegraph that they have despatched a ship with the supply of their wants, and that in return they will receive the superfluous productions of their more genial soil. That man who carries the natural products of working men from one part of the globe to another, he also is the working man, and he struggles against time, want, distance, space, ocean, and elements, and diffuses the blessings of each place and climate to all. The man, too, who is toiling night by night to learn how the kinds of matter now useless may be turned to use; who, out of rude, raw, or refuse matter, is creating new beautiful and valuable substances; who, by wielding the magical art of the chemist, is gradually converting all that seems valueless and waste to worth and work; he, too, is a working man in the highest sense of the word. What I now ask you, therefore, is-Does there remain anything more to be done for the education of the working men of