end” at all?  I shall be asked.  Has Natural Science shown any such tendency, or given any reason to fear that such a concession would lead to further demands?  In answer to that question, let me sketch, in dramatic fashion, the history of her recent career in Oxford.  In the dark ages of our University (some five-and-twenty years ago), while we still believed in classics and mathematics as constituting a liberal education, Natural Science sat weeping at our gates.  “Ah, let me in!” she moaned; “why cram reluctant youth with your unsatisfying lore?  Are they not hungering for bones; yea, panting for sulphuretted hydrogen?” We heard and we pitied.  We let her in and housed her royally; we adorned her palace with re-agents and retorts, and made it a very charnel-house of bones, and we cried to our undergraduates, “The feast of Science is spread!  Eat, drink, and be happy!” But they would not.  They fingered the bones, and thought them dry.  They sniffed at the hydrogen, and turned away.  Yet for all that Science ceased not to cry, “More gold, more gold!” And her three fair daughters, Chemistry, Biology, and Physics (for the modern horse-leech is more prolific than in the days of Solomon), ceased not to plead, “Give, give!” And we gave; we poured forth our wealth like water (I beg her pardon, like H{_2}O), and we could not help thinking there was something weird and uncanny in the ghoul-like facility with which she absorbed it.

The curtain rises on the second act of the drama.  Science is still weeping, but this time it is for lack of pupils, not of teachers or machinery.  “We are unfairly handicapped!” she cries.  “You have prizes and scholarships for classics and mathematics, and you bribe your best students to desert us.  Buy us some bright, clever boys to teach, and then see what we can do!” Once more we heard and pitied.  We had bought her bones; we bought her boys.  And now at last her halls were filled—­not only with teachers paid to teach, but also with learners paid to learn.  And we have not much to complain of in results, except that perhaps she is a little too ready to return on our hands all but the “honour-men”—­all, in fact, who really need the helping hand of an educator.  “Here, take back your stupid ones!” she cries.  “Except as subjects for the scalpel (and we have not yet got the Human Vivisection Act through Parliament) we can do nothing with them!”

The third act of the drama is yet under rehearsal; the actors are still running in and out of the green-room, and hastily shuffling on their new and ill-fitting dresses; but its general scope is not far to seek.  At no distant day our once timid and tearful guest will be turning up her nose at the fare provided for her.  “Give me no more youths to teach,” she will say; “but pay me handsomely, and let me think.  Plato and Aristotle were all very well in their way; Diogenes and his tub for me!” The allusion is not inappropriate.  There can be little