s steamboat, the _Comet_ made its first voyage on the Clyde,
and the development of steam navigation proceeded more rapidly than that
of steam locomotion by land. Sir Humphry Davy began his researches in
1800, and took part in that year, with Count Rumford and Sir Joseph
Banks, in founding the Royal Institution. His invention of the safety
lamp was not matured until 1815.

But if the principal contributions of England to physical science in the
early years of the century were mainly in the direction of practical
application, her contributions to pure theory under the regency and in
the reign of William IV. were no less distinguished. Sir John Herschel,
following in the footsteps of his father, began in 1824 his observations
on double stars and his researches upon the parallax of fixed stars,
while Sir George Airy published in 1826 his mathematical treatises on
lunar and planetary theory. In Michael Faraday England possessed at once
an eminent chemist and the greatest electrician of the age. The
discovery of benzine and the liquefaction of numerous gases were
followed by an investigation of electric currents, and in 1831 by the
crowning discovery of induction. Not less valuable perhaps than these
discoveries of his own were the fertile suggestions which he left to
others. William Smith, sometimes called the father of modern English
geology, vigorously followed up the work of James Hutton by publishing
in 1815 his great map of English _strata_ as identified by fossils.
Charles Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ marks a great advance in
geological science. In this book, which appeared in 1833, the author
advanced the view, now universally accepted, that the great geological
changes of the past are not to be explained as catastrophes, followed by
successive creations, but as the product of the continuous play of
forces still at work. This theory contained all that was vital in the
doctrine of evolution; but it was only at a later date, when the
doctrine had become the property of zoologists as well as geologists and
had been popularised by Darwin, that it came to exercise an influence
over non-scientific thought.

[Pageheading: _UNIVERSITY REFORM._]

A review of the literary and scientific progress of this period would be
incomplete without some notice of progress in higher education. The
universities of Oxford and Cambridge with their numerous colleges had in
the eighteenth century lapsed into that lethargic condition which