d. Nor in any event are regrets much in order
over the possible might-have-beens of an institution whose laboratories
were the seat of the physical investigations of Thomas Young, through
which the wave theory of light first gained a footing, and of the
brilliant chemical researches of Davy, which practically founded the
science of electro-chemistry and gave the chemical world first knowledge
of a galaxy of hitherto unknown elements. Through the labors of
these men, and through the popular lecture-courses delivered at the
institution by such other notables of science as Wollaston, Dalton, and
Rum-ford, the enterprise had become world-famous before the close of the
first decade of its existence.

From that day till this the character of the Royal Institution has
not greatly changed. The enterprise shifted around during its earliest
years, while it was gaining its place in the scheme of things; but once
that was found, like a true British institution it held its course with
an inertia that a mere century of time could not be expected to alter.
Rumford was the sole founder of the enterprise, but it was Davy who
gave it the final and definitive cast. He it was who established the
tradition that the Royal Institution was to be essentially a laboratory
for brilliant original investigations, the investigator to deliver
a yearly course of lectures, but to be otherwise untrammelled. It
occupied, and has continued to occupy, the anomalous position of a
school to which pupils are on no account admitted, and whose professors
teach nothing except by a brief course of lectures to which whoever
cares to pay the admission price may freely enter.

But the marvellous results achieved at the Royal Institution have more
than justified the existence of so anomalous an enterprise. Superlatives
are always dangerous, but it may well be doubted whether there is
another single institution in the world where so many novel original
discoveries in physical science have been made as have been brought to
light in the laboratories of the building on Albemarle Street during
this first century of its occupancy; for practically all that is to
be credited to Thomas Young, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and John
Tyndall, not to mention living investigators, is to be credited also to
the Royal Institution, whose professorial chairs these great men have
successively occupied. Davy spent here the best years of his youth
and prime. Faraday, his direct success