Note 196 — Chapter XXXIII

In bringing to a close a work which may in some measure be considered a kind of Résumé of Natural knowledge, it may not be either out of place or irrelevant to our subject to allude more particularly to the encouragement of late years granted to scientific investigation by our own Government.

It must be confessed that Great Britain for a long time remained behind the nations of the continent in fostering scientific enterprise and research; and if England has rivalled in most branches of natural knowledge, and surpassed in some, every other people, it has arisen more from individual exertion, and that spirit of association which forms so happy a characteristic of our race, and which has in our political institutions so mainly contributed to our national greatness and prosperity, than from any direct encouragement from our rulers. Whilst France and other continental nations were endowing the votaries of science, were lavishing money on scientific expeditions, and founding institutions which will hand down the names of their sovereigns to posterity as the benefactors of mankind, England had done little in the same track beyond fitting out those memorable expeditions of Cook, and, subsequently, those of Vancouver and Flinders, and the support granted to our great national Observatory, which, under the direction of Bradley, Maskelyne, Pond, and Airy, has attained a degree of celebrity and utility unequalled by any astronomical foundation in ancient or modern times.

The conclusion of a long war, in opening the scientific repositories of the continent to our countrymen, showed us how much our great institutions, with the above solitary exception, were behindhand, not only in extent and utility, but in the liberality with which they were conducted. Possessing as we did the most ample means, from our immense colonial possessions and our widely-extended commerce, to add to the stock of our knowledge in natural history, our collections were infinitely behind those of the great states of the continent, and scarcely on a par with those of the sovereigns of a second and even third rate importance. A better system was loudly called for, and a better system has been adopted. Our great national collection of the British Museum—and I here refer more particularly to its scientific and antiquarian department, for there is still much room for improvement in the literary—has in a few years, thanks to the liberality of Parliament and the exertions of its trustees and officers, become equal in every respect, and superior in many, to any similar institution on the continent. Two establishments have been created within the last dozen of years which reflect the greatest honour on the statesmen, Sir F. Baring, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the late Earl of Besborough, as chief Commissioner of the Woods and Forests, who fostered them in their infancy, and on the talented individuals who had been selected to carry out the enlightened views of the Government—the Museum of Practical Geology, a designation that conveys a very inadequate idea of the extent of its attributes or of its utility, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. To the first the public is already indebted for such a geological survey and map of the empire as never had been planned or executed in any other country—only a small instalment, however, of great services which the nation and geological science are likely to derive from the labours of Sir H. Delabeche and his collaborators. The Royal Gardens at Kew, under the direction of Sir W. J. Hooker, lose nothing when compared with the most celebrated establishments of the kind, ancient or modern: never was public money better bestowed, or in a way to convey more useful instruction and gratification to the great mass of the community. Whilst every German university had its Museum of Comparative Anatomy, when the government of revolutionary France had placed at the disposal of Cuvier ample means to lay the basis of that science of which he was to be considered the founder, an eminent surgeon, John Hunter, animated by the love of science alone, and unaided by his Government, was rendering a similar service to Great Britain, in laying the foundation of that Museum which so justly bears his honoured name. Thanks to the liberality of the Government, and to the well-judged appreciation of the Royal College of Surgeons, the Hunterian Collection has become the property of the nation, and has received such additions and ameliorations as not to be behind any of those of the continent; whilst in point of arrangement, facilities granted for study, and real practical utility, it infinitely surpasses them all. To it we principally are indebted for the introduction of the study of comparative anatomy into this country, and for the possession of one of its greatest modern expositors, Professor Owen.

It may appear invidious, at a time when every department of our Government is showing itself so desirous of promoting the cause of science, to point to any in particular: still we cannot refrain from making special mention of one to which science in general, and more particularly that branch of it which forms the principal object of this work, and our best national interests, owe a deep and lasting debt of gratitude—the Hydrographic department of the Admiralty; which, under its present able chief, Sir Francis Beaufort, has attained a degree of eminence unequalled by that of any other maritime country. The Admiralty has profited of a long peace to extend our knowledge over almost every region of the globe, conferring thereby an immense service on geographical science, and placing in the hands of our national and commercial marine a collection of charts and nautical instructions unparalleled in the history of navigation for their extent and exactitude. Another branch of inquiry, closely connected with Hydrography and Navigation, which it required the encouragement of a government to institute, the investigation of the laws of terrestrial magnetism and meteorology, has been very liberally provided for by Parliament, and most ably carried out, under the direction of Colonel Sabine, by the establishment of special observatories in our widely extended colonies, and by the publication and distribution of their results.

The several maritime expeditions undertaken since the peace in a purely scientific view reflect the highest credit on the departments of the Government with which they have originated, as they do on the eminent individuals, many of whom still live to enjoy their well-merited fame, who have carried out their country’s wishes. The names of Parry, Franklin, Back, James C. Ross, and Richardson, will be preserved in the memory of posterity long after the ephemeral glory of their professional career will have been forgotten.

Although it is to the projectors of such an altered state of things, and to the statesmen who encouraged and brought it about, that our first acknowledgement is due, our thanks must be also expressed to that branch of the legislature which, holding, as it rightly does, the public purse, has so liberally come forward upon every occasion, when solicited, in granting the means to promote scientific enterprise. The votary of science therefore owes to the House of Commons the expression of his unmingled gratitude.

But, in paying that just tribute to the ministers of the Crown and to Parliament, we must not pass over in silence the encouragement which science has in every department met with from the East India Company. Lords of an immense territory, the Court of Directors, and its representatives in India, have always shown themselves ready to contribute in a most liberal spirit to the extension of our knowledge of their widely extended empire. The trigonometrical surveys of India, the establishment of observatories, the endowment of colleges and of scientific societies, the formation of collections of natural history at great expense, and which it distributes to all those who are likely to make good use of them, the publication of works on physical researches, on natural history, of astronomical observations, bestowed with so liberal a hand to men of science, the formation of such a map of its extended dominions and of charts of its coasts as would do honour to any government, must place the East India Company in the first rank of those mighty potentates of the earth to whom science will both now and in after ages feel placed under the most lasting obligations.

Connected with our Oriental empire, it is due to some of the native sovereigns of India to state that they have not been behindhand in imitating the liberal example of their powerful protectors. Two native princes, the Rajah of Travancore and the King of Oude, have at very great expense established astronomical observatories in their territories, furnished with European instruments of the most delicate construction, and placed under the direction of European officers amply endowed and provided for. The peninsula of India at the present moment possesses four astronomical observatories little behind those of Europe as regards the means of observation; until very lately there did not exist one public observatory in the whole extent of the United States of America.

[A national observatory was established at Washington in the year 1843.]