(1852, November 2) The Evening Courant, p. 3.Philosophical Institution Public Lecture—29 October 1852, Segment 6.
These nations excelled in all kinds a mechanical skill; if they could boast of no crystal palaces, the grandeur of their solid architecture was unsurpassed, and that produce of their looms dazzle the eye, as if it were woven out of sunbeam's; that day, with all their gorgeous workshops, have passed away, and have left behind them no shining traces of renown: because the greatness of a people when living, and their glory when dead, depend on causes which these nations did not sufficiently respect. Finer influences, and in more genial training than mechanical sciences can supply, are required to nourish and support the moral characters of men—to eliminate their intelligence is—to refine their imaginations—and to mold our hearts to the standard of heroic virtue. Let me not be misunderstood. I speak in no disparagement of the natural sciences: as branches of a liberal education there worthy of all high honour and of all encouragement. But, not more so than many other departments of learning—not more so than the dead languages of Greece and Rome, with all their immortal legacies of beauty and of truth—not more than a history—not more so than philosophy: moral, political, and metaphysical. It is against the study of these sciences, to the exclusion—and this I fear, in the extreme into which the present times are running—the exclusion of these pursuits of so useful and improving a character, and which, as a discipline of the mind, are even, in my humble opinion at least, entitled to take rank before the natural sciences—it is against this partial or one sided system that I protest; and I venture to assert that unless men are destined for professions and which no appointments with physical truth is a matter of paramount necessity, or less the bent of their genius leads them in that particular direction, they ought not to be required to cultivate the natural sciences to such an extent as to defraud of their due other studies which equally solicit, and are least equally worthy of their regard. It is, therefore, with peculiar satisfaction that those who are interested in the cause (as I conceive it) of right education, must contemplate the enlightened spirit in which this institution has set about its work, and the large-scale on which the endeavour to minister to the wants and enjoyments of the community. Historical research very properly engages a large share of your attention. Listening within these walls to the history of the early Asiatic nations, you shall superintend with the intrepid Layard, the explorations of the old cities of Assyria, and be present, as it were, at the disinterment of mysterious relics, long submerged under the devouring sands, but now laid open to the light, and compelled to render up their meaning; and thus showing that, just as men, by the aid of the telescope, can subdue the territories of immeasurable space, so can he, by the resources of the skill, triumph over the spoliations of all-consuming time. Greece with her imaginative mythology, her poetry, her history, and her philosophy, has already passed in review before your eyes—her radiant shrines, garlanded and with flowers by the hands of the officiating graces, at a time when our northern altars were from reeking with human blood. In Roman history you shall study, on the noblest scale,
