rwinian view; and paved the way for the
highest researches in physical science in that university. For a most
eloquent statement of the opposition of modern physical science to
mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac Newton,
see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery,
London, 1878, p. 247.

The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen when, in the
darkest period of the French Revolution, there was founded at Paris the
great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and when, in the early years
of the nineteenth century, scientific and technical education spread
quietly upon the Continent. By the middle of the century France and
Germany were dotted with well-equipped technical and scientific schools,
each having chemical and physical laboratories.

The English-speaking lands lagged behind. In England, Oxford and
Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the United
States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and feeble. Very
significant is it that, at that period, while Yale College had in
its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor of chemistry and the
professor of physics most widely known in the United States--it had no
physical or chemical laboratory in the modern sense, and confined its
instruction in these subjects to examinations upon a text-book and the
presentation of a few lectures. At the State University of Michigan,
which had even then taken a foremost place in the higher education west
of the Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and
virtually none in physics. This being the state of things in the middle
of the century in institutions remarkably free from clerical control,
it can be imagined what was the position of scientific instruction in
smaller colleges and universities where theological considerations were
entirely dominant.

But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began in Great
Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific education; men
of wealth and public spirit began making contributions to them, and thus
came the growth of a new system of instruction in which Chemistry and
Physics took just rank.

By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in America,
when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young member of Congress from
Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing from the public lands
a broad national system of colleges in which scientific and techni