better possibilities. After his return from the Continent he was elected a member of the Committee of Management of the London Mechanics' Institution. He opened rooms for carrying on commercially the business of an electrician, an electrical instrument maker, and electrotyper, intending at the same time to deliver lectures on science and travel. But as his friend Mr, John Angell remarks, in a memoir prefixed to his Vindication of Phrenology, "his enthusiastic love of science and general research was destined to become a foe to the habits and forms of attention required in successful commercial business. Many a time friends calling on him late in the evening found him so thoroughly absorbed in pursuing the theory of some practical problem he had succeeded in working out that he had forgotten, meantime, that he had taken neither food nor refreshment since his morning breakfast." He was frequently called on to lecture at institutions at a distance, when he would be absent for days at a time, chiefly on subjects connected with his European tour, among which a favorite course with him was one of six lectures on Switzerland, its social and historical aspects, physical geography, geology, and glacier formations.
About the year 1846 Mr. William Ellis made an offer of one thousand pounds sterling toward establishing a school, to be called the Birkbeck School, on the premises of the London Mechanics' Institution, in which, besides the principles of the natural sciences, the principles of social well-being, or of social and political economy, should be regularly taught. The Committee of Management of the institution were unfavorable to this plan, and ignored it in their report; whereupon a bitter controversy ensued, in which Mr. Williams was active in opposing the course of the committee and insisting on giving a hearing to Mr. Ellis's proposition. Finally, the offer was accepted over the heads of the managing committee, the project was put under the care of a special committee, and the first Birkbeck School was established July 17, 1848, with Mr. John Rüntze as head master. Many years later Mr. Williams met one of his strongest opponents in that controversy, who confessed to him: "We all thought you and your party were wrong; now I know that your party was right and we were wrong."
The Birkbeck Institution was successful from the first, and attracted the attention of George Combe, a man distinguished for his advocacy of schemes for bettering the condition of man, and who had become acquainted with Mr. Williams while he was studying in Edinburgh. He determined, with the aid of money which Mr. Ellis should furnish, to establish a similar secular school in Edinburgh, in which phrenology should be taught in addition to the other branches. The problem of finding a com-
