My Dear Sir,

Concurring with you in opinion that the Government of this great country does less for the encouragement of science than that of any other civilised state, I am not disposed to admit that our English universities and ecclesiastical establishment are copartners with our civil governors in the disgrace attaching to them by this statement of a fact. As to “Natural History,” as a science, it was not “come to the birth”—was scarce indeed conceived, or in embryo state—at the time when the several colleges were founded, and scholarships and fellowships endowed, by the pious and munificent of days gone by. These men saw and felt the want of something more immediately necessary than science itself; and it is no imputation on their judgment or their charity—on their heads or their hearts—that they provided, in the first place, and by due preference, “for their own.” Had they not done so, they would have been “worse than the infidel” of modern times, who endows no institution for the promotion of that science he affects to value as the favourite of Liberals, and the one thing “useful.”