circles because he had outlived his capacity to govern. But his fellowcitizens may well revere the memory of one whose public achievements far outbalanced his deficiencies, whilst the The Contemporary Review.

reigning family cannot fail to think with gratitude of the statesman who faithfuly piloted their fortunes through a sea of calamities.

John Foreman.

two later was shown by the sense of something nearly amounting to compulsion under which he entered upon his forty years of labor for the helping of the youth of London. Immediately on leaving Eton he plunged into work among the poorest and most neglected of London boys, not knowing whither it would lead him; and the contrast between their lot and that of his own class was simply intolerable to him. "I had never," he wrote long afterwards, "been brought into contact with real poverty and want before, and felt almost as though I should go mad unless I did something to try and help some of the wretched little chaps I used to find running about the streets." And so, as everyone has seen from the obituary notices, he began by teaching reading, with the Bible as reading book, to two boy crossing-sweepers at night under the Adelphi arches. But he was soon convinced that, for him at any rate, equipment to help street boys must be based upon genuine knowledge of their point of view. It followed, as of necessity, that he took the most simple and direct steps to place himself at their point of view, by becoming one of them himself. For two or three nights a week for six months he lived their life-blacking boots, holding horses, or doing any other odd jobs he saw them doing, and sleeping out with them on barges, under tarpaulins, or on a ledge of the Adelphi arches-breakfasting, unsus

pected, with his father next morning in Carleton Gardens. Round such a nucleus of fact legends must accrete, and it is with reluctance that one is now enjoined by the higher criticism not to believe that he once blacked Sir James Weir Hogg's boots for the usual fee. It would be rash to dogmatize for or against the general need for an apprenticeship like that accepted by Quintin Hogg, with all its inevitably repulsive accessories, in the case of those who wish to exert the most powerful leverage on the lives of the least fortunate of their fellow-citizens. Opinions of great weight might undoubtedly be quoted on either side of that question. It is in some respects akin to the problem presented by the difference between the methods of Roman Catholic and other Christian missionaries in Oriental countries. But whatever may be the sound conclusion on the issues raised at large, there can hardly be a doubt of the rightness of the instinct by which Hogg was guided in his own case. If, with the great advantage given him with all boys by the possession of the assured confidence of manner and bearing which so usually accompanies athletic prowess, he was yet conscious of a damaging aloofness, it would indeed be presumptuous to say that he chose a wrong way of breaking it down. For that he did break it down is a fact which has been written triumphantly on the lives of hundreds-indeed, of thousands-whose greatest pride has been, and is, that he was their friend. Once down, too, Quintin Hogg took very good care that no wall or hedge of division should ever grow up again. Having established a ragged school, for two or three years he scarcely missed his attendance at it for a single night, and his attendance meant hard teaching from 7 to 10 o'clock. Moreover, when rather later on he had established a "twopenny dosshouse" for boys at his

school, who otherwise would have been sleeping in thieves' kitchens and recruiting the criminal population, he and a master whom he had engaged divided between them the duty of sleeping in a kind of cubicle at the end of a dormitory holding forty, and of seeing that the other inmates got up for their work at any hour from 5.30 a.m. onwards.

For

Too long, though most attractive, would it be to tell here the story of the steady development of Quintin Hogg's undertakings,-partly through the introduction of necessary classification among the ever-growing numbers of boys of various social grades and antecedents who were drawn together by the irresistible magnetism of the schools dominated by his personality. Towards that development he gave his money, if possible, as freely as he lavished all the leisure which, as a first-rate man of business much engaged in the City, he possessed. many years he is said to have spent £5,000 a year in meeting the difference between the fees paid by the members of the classes and clubs at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the expenses of maintaining them; and these subventions, together with the very large sums which he devoted to the purchase (in 1881) of the original building and its conversion and equipment for the uses of that most remarkable institution, are estimated at not less than £100,000, which, however, was but a part of his manifold, well-considered, and carefully applied benefactions. There are no words of praise adequate for the merits of generosity of this kind, not a shilling of which is wasted, or in the least degree checks self-help in a single beneficiary. The whole idée mère of the Polytechnic, too, was in the highest degree and the best sense liberal. In Mr. Hogg's plain words, "what we wanted to develop

Its

our Institute into"-it was then (1880) in Long Acre "was a place which should recognize that God had given man more than one side to his character, and where we could gratify any reasonable taste, whether athletic, intellectual, spiritual, or social." And for twenty-one years that is what the "Poly" has done and has been. very great value as an agency for technical instruction of the most varied descriptions has been, happily, for . many years recognized and stimulated by substantial grants from the London County Council. The value of its secondary and higher teaching is attested by numerous degrees and scholarships of many kinds won by its students. The interests of physical development and prowess are promoted by the provision of large cricket and tennis grounds, and by the existence of many very flourishing clubs for the pursuit of athletics of various sorts. Other recreations, meeting tastes for country life, for literature, and for public affairs, are supported by distinct societies. And at the heart and centre of the whole, recognized as the dominating inspiration, but never obtruded, has ever been an intense Christian faith, on the part of men ready and eager to afford aids to the cultivation of the religious life by all who cared to use them. Chief among those men, though zealously and powerfully supported by associates of like temper to his own, has always been the founder, Quintin The Spectator.

Hogg. For many years he knew every member of the "Poly" personally; he was always accessible to any member -and there are now fifteen thousand of them-who wished for advice as to the things of the body, mind, or soul; and for such and divers administrative purposes (besides the conduct of direct religious instruction on Sundays) he spent there several hours of almost every day of his life in London.

No human being can measure either the amount of self-sacrifice concentrated in such a life as that of which we have been speaking, or the extent of its contribution, direct and indirect, alike to the higher and the more material welfare of the nation. To contemplate it is impossible without the conviction that in the multiplication of such lives, combining a fervent piety with a wide human outlook, would be found the solution of almost all the problems which most grievously oppress us. Quintin Hogg was not a man of genius, not even a man of at all remarkable intellectual grasp; but he had an intense and consecrated purpose, and a genuine and sympathetic comprehension of the many-sided nature of man. It is the business of our Churches and our now reconstituted national system of education to provide the England of the twentieth century with larger numbers of citizens of such spirit and with such ideals. By their success or failure in doing so they will be judged by future generations.

"All minerals, as also all metals, are born of one Principium or beginning, to wit, of a vapor, which the superior stars do, as it were, extract from the element of the earth by a certain distillation of the Macrocosm or greater world, the influx of which upper astral heat, operates upon things below, by an aerial fiery property, infusing it in, spiritually and invisibly." Thus Basil Valentine in his "Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," a book much sought after in its day, which was supposed to contain, among other things, the secret by which all other metals could be transformed into gold. The sentence quoted gives a fairly typical statement of the theory which the alchemists had built up out of the débris of Alexandrian science. The Coptic monks, who were the first practisers of the art, had inherited almost in spite of themselves some shreds of the knowledge of chemical processes which the wisdom of the Ptolemies had caused to be brought about by their endowment of research and of patient experiment. But their national and professional ignorance had led the monkish alchemists to strangely pervert it. The Egyptian authors of some of the earliest alchemical MSS. found it necessary to explain to their Christian disciples that "serpent's blood" really meant the stone called hæmatite, "the seed of the Sun" white hellebore and the like, which is much as if a modern druggist should need to be told that "dragon's blood" does not presuppose the slaughter of a fabulous animal, and that "hart's tongue" does not denote any part of a fourfooted beast, but is the name of a common fern. But such mistakes in detail were nothing compared with the misconceptions of the aim and

method of science which their theological prepossessions led them to form. Being both by nature and training averse from the patient investigation and deduction which had already brought the Greek philosophers halfway on the road to truth, they substituted everywhere analogy for analysis, and lent to inanimate matter the volltion and passions that they found swaying the minds of men. As there were seven planets an assumption better founded than they knew-there must, it was argued, be seven metals corresponding to them. And as the soul of the Christian was, in theory at all events, struggling to free itself from the weight and oppression of his earthly desires, so six of these metals, lead, tin, iron, copper, mercury, and silver, were supposed to be anxious to lay aside the base matter with which they were mixed and to appear as the pure representatives of the sun or gold. Hence it was only necessary for the alchemist to help them to the accomplishment of their aspirations, and he would be doing a work not only pleasing to God, but profitable to himself. This was to be brought about by the study of Nature indeed, but by a method entirely different from that of their heathen predecessors. The mode adopted by the Creator at the creation of the world was that to be followed, and might be expected to reveal itself, not to experiment, but to prayer. Hence all alchemical operations began with prayer, and intuition was thought to be a surer way of arriving at Nature's secrets than the older method of trial and error. So the alchemists blundered on from one mistake to another, always jealously watched by the Church, who accused them, with some show of reason, of

a leaning towards Oriental heresies, until the revival of learning and its political consequences freed science from its fetters. But at first, like a prisoner long bound, it could make little use of its freedom, and it was not until Lavoisier, the great chemist who perished in the French Revolution, formulated the truth that "nothing is created in the operations either of art or of nature," and that the united mass of all substances subjected to physical or chemical change in every case remains constant, that the modern science of chemistry can be said to have been born. Thereafter its progress was rapid. Our own countryman, John Dalton, in 1808, taking up the investigation of the atoms or indivisible quantities of substances centuries before shadowed forth by Democritus of Abdera and his followers, showed that each of the elementary substances in Nature has its specific atomic weight, which is as characteristic of it as, and much more constant than any of, its physical properties or its external appearance. From that time, the study of chemistry was largely occupied with the investigation and determination of atomic weights, until none of the seventy-six so-called elements-from the gas hydrogen which is so light as to be reckoned as unity or the lowest in the scale to the rare metal uranium just two hundred and forty times as heavy as hydrogen-remained without its distinguishing weight. And now began the romance of modern chemistry. Comparing those weights of the atoms of the different elementary substances, it was seen that those whose atomic weights were fairly close to each other were also alike in their external appearance or other physical properties. Thus they can be divided into groups in which both their atomic weights and physical properties roughly correspond; and while, for instance,

the halogens or salt-forming substances, chlorine, iodine, and bromine, forms one group giving similar reactions and combining in something like the same proportions, the triad of metals, iron, nickel, and cobalt, whose atomic weights are far greater, show a similar degree of correspondence among themselves. To this, which was in the main the discovery of the Russian chemist Mendelecf, was added the further demonstration that the atomic weights of nearly all the elementary substances were exact multiples of the unity represented by hydrogen, and that in the few exceptions which seemed to controvert this generalization, there was ground for supposing error in the calculation of the atomic weight. It seems difficult to resist the further conclusion that all the socalled chemical elements are really compounds formed by the addition in regularly varying proportions of what may be collectively called "matter" to some substance (or substances) hitherto unknown.

The search for this unknown substance or "First Matter" is, therefore, that on which modern chemists are at present engaged, and it bears a singular though not an exact likeness to that of their predecessors, the alchemists. Were it successful, it does not follow that we should immediately know how to "make" gold, but we should at any rate know how gold is made, and this might prove to be a very considerable step towards the process of its manufacture. This might not be in itself desirable, but a greater power of synthesis or the artificial construction of elements would be an inestimable blessing to mankind, and would probably solve at one blow the problem of the costless production of light and power. What the prospects of success are it is somewhat difficult to say, as men of science do not always care to give to the