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this meeting pledges itself to take all practical steps to assist in the formation of the Imperial Institute and to support it when brought into existence." Although that resolution lam sure expresses your feeling, I hope you will excuse me if I detain you for a very short time at this late period of the afternoon. My Lord Mayor, the reading of that resolution makes it quite clear to all that you have not summoned this great meeting of the citizens of London to consider steps and to devise modes and methods for celebrating Her Majesty's Jubilee. When the day comes for that auspicious event, you, my Lord Mayor, and the Sheriffs of London will be true to the traditions of this historical corporation, and the hospitality of the City of London will be extended far and wide, to rich and poor alike, and if Cornhill and Fleet Street do not flow as of old with sack and other wines, and if Smithfield is not illuminated with bonfires, it will be because you have devised better modes of entertainment for your fellow-citizens. The object of the meeting to-day is to found an institution which will be commemorative of the gratitude of Her Majesty's loyal subjects for her fifty years of a glorious reign. If we look back in the annals of history, we shall be inclined to boast of the reigns of two of Her Majesty's predecessors, namely, the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne, but our successors as well as ourselves will joyfully acknowledge that the reign of Queen Victoria is greater. When the Queen ascended the Throne fifty years ago, the inhabitants of this country enjoyed a not inconsiderable amount of freedom and of liberty. Those liberties have been increased, and with the increasing liberties the love for the Throne has augmented. Fifty years ago Canada was an agglomeration of separate colonies ; it is now a great dominion traversed from one end to another by a net-work of railways, and one of the greatest agricultural-producing countries in the world. Australia was hardly known, and was then probably only a mass of convict settlements ; it is now a great kingdom of Englishmen and Englishwomen. These acquisitions of territory, and these conquests have not been made by war and by the sword. They have been made by men and women who have left their country of their own free will to found a new England which shall be attached to the old England and to their Sovereign. What can be more natural, gentlemen, than that a grateful and a loyal people should wish to commemorate fifty years of a glorious reign, fifty years in which the genius of a free nation has made great strides in all those arts and sciences which civilization requires, by founding an institution which shall at all times draw to its shelter the products of the Mother-country and of the provinces, which shall be the nucleus of those great commercial museums which you all require, not only in this city but throughout the provinces, which shall be a symbol of the link which unites England to her colonies, and which I hope will be worthy of the Queen in whose honour we intend to found it? Professor Huxley :My Lord Mayor, my Lords and gentlemen—l propose to take a step which I believe to be a very impolitic one on the part of any speaker, and it certainly is one which I have rarely been in the habit of taking myself, and that is, to crave your indulgence; but my reason for doing so is one which you I think will all easily apprehend, and lies in these facts : that at breakfast time this morning I received an intimation that I should have to speak to one of these resolutions and I adjusted my mind accordingly; but on reaching my place I found that was a mistake, and that I should have to speak on another resolution, so that I made a new adjustment. But, unfortunately, I was still under a misapprehension, and it turned out that yet another adjustment would have to take place, and I should have to speak to that which has just been read to you. Now it is a very good thing to have a flexible mind, but one's mind is not altogether like a reversible paletot, and I am afraid under these circumstances that my observations may be a little mixed, and may have more or less reference to all three of the several topics to which I have had occasion to direct my attention. But, if it should be so, it will be the more excusable, as all three are logically connected together. The resolutions have been drawn up with great skill, and if you grant the first Ido not see any very clear or logical escape from those which follow. It is somewhat unfortunate for me that the resolution with respect to which I have to address you is one of a specially practical character, and which could be dealt with advantageously only by persons who are acquainted with the disposal of the resources of the country in a manner which it does not fall to a man of science to deal with, and the remarks which I wish to address to you —in fact, the only raison d'etre of my being here, I take it, is that I have been more or less connected with science during my life —the remarks that I wish to address to you will be conceived from that point of view. It may not be within the knowledge of all my hearers that the last fifty years, tho epoch of Her Majesty's reign (not, let us hope, by any means co-extensive with it), is remarkable above all corresponding periods of human history that I know anything about, for two peculiarities ; the one is, the enormous development of industry, and the other is the no less remarkable and prodigious development of physical science, which two developments indeed have gone hand in hand. The opinion which lam now expressing to you is not one formed ad hoe for the purposes of this meeting; it is one which I expressed two or three years ago when I was taking leave of the Royal Society ; and it is a matter which is perfectly obvious to any person who has paid attention either to the history of science or to the history of industry, that there has been nothing, not only in any period of fifty years, but in any century, in the slightest degree comparable to the magnitude and the importance of the growth of those two branches of human activity which has taken place since the year 1837. Now my memory goes back far enough to call to my mind with great vividness a period when industry, or at least the chiefs and the leaders of industry, looked very askance at science. The practical man prided himself on caring nothing for it, and making a point of disbelieving that any advantage to industry could be gained by the growth of what he was pleased to call abstract and theoretical knowledge. But within the last thirty years more particularly, that state of things has entirely changed. There began in the first place a slight flirtation between science and industry, and that flirtation has grown into an intimacy —I may almost say a courtship, until those who watch the signs of the times say that it is high time that the yeung people married and set up an establishment for themselves. Gentlemen, this great scheme which is before you, from my point of view is the public and ceremonial marriage of science and industry; it is the recognition on the part of those persons who are best able to judge of what are the wants of the industry of the time that, if they