The founding of State laboratories for original research was proposed and advocated by the late Lieutenant-Colonel Strange, F.R.S., in communications read before the British Association, and in evidence given before the Royal Commissioners.[[33]] As the erection and maintenance of State laboratories would require a large sum of money, and as all classes of the community would share in the benefit, it is reasonable to suggest that the money should come from some source towards which all classes of the community, either directly or indirectly contribute, and therefore from some national fund.
In national improvements, expense is quite a secondary consideration; the funds however for providing State laboratories already exist; the sum of nearly £600,000 has accumulated in the form of fees received by Government for the granting of patents for inventions; and as the discoveries made by scientific men form the materials by means of which those inventions were made, the money thus accumulated may be justly claimed by scientific discoverers as a suitable
source from which their labours should be remunerated by the State.
Strong arguments might be adduced both against and in favour of the application of this money for the purpose. Inventors are a great wealth-producing class of the community; they are at present very highly taxed, and receive but little advantage in return; to tax them without giving them equivalent advantages, strikes very near to the root of commercial prosperity, by diminishing improvements in arts and manufactures. If an inventor is poor and his patent is valuable, he is also frequently harassed out of it by litigation. Inventors are usually poor, and but little able to pay taxes on patents at all; their pecuniary position in this country is not greatly better than that of discoverers; they are largely at the mercy of manufacturers and capitalists; and the injustice to which they are sometimes subjected is notorious and disgraceful. On the other hand, the fund already exists; inventors also receive an equivalent from investigators, discovery is the indispensable basis of nearly all invention; patented inventions are formed by means of the knowledge obtained by pure scientific research. The poverty of a man does not justify his taking the fruits of the labours of another man without paying for them. If also the patent fees were thus applied, the cost of research would then be paid for by all classes of the community, somewhat in proportion to the benefit derived, because the cost of patents in general ultimately falls upon the public at
large, in the shape of an increased price put upon the commodity, in order to pay the cost of the patent, like the grower of wheat is paid by the consumers of bread, through the medium of the baker, the miller, and corn merchant.
Whilst the benefits derived from the labours of discoverers, flows chiefly in the form of money into the hands of wealthy manufacturers, and finally gets locked up in the possession of capitalists and landowners, it is hardly to be expected that the Government will be in possession of funds necessary to promote research unless some such plan as this is adopted. Should the wealthy and governing classes however become sufficiently acquainted with the value of research, and of the essential and permanent dependence of their material prosperity upon it, there will then be some hope that they will be willing to contribute in a more direct manner their just share towards paying the expenses. There is, however, but little prospect of this whilst the influence of wealth so depresses the scientific education of those classes at the Universities.
The fundamental object in founding State laboratories should be to keep a staff of the most competent men wholly engaged in original research in pure science, and a secondary object might be to train assistants to become investigators. Such laboratories would doubtless be located in London, and be on a scale of magnitude creditable to science and the nation. They might very suitably include
departments for the simpler pure sciences and even for biology.
It is manifest that the arguments which support the proposition for professorships of original research in those sciences apply in a greater or less degree to other sciences; and it has been stated that "there is no ground upon which the scheme can be limited to the subject of natural philosophy." In reference to this remark, (which, like most objections, contains some truth), it must be remembered that there is a natural order of dependence of the sciences upon each other, in which order also they are being evolved. It is a general truth that the physical sciences of light and heat are based upon mechanical conditions of the particles of matter; that the science of chemistry is founded upon physics; that biological phenomena are dependent upon physical and chemical conditions; that psychological subjects are based upon biology; and that biological science cannot progress excepting in proportion to the advance of the sciences on which it is based. In addition to this general order of precedence of evolution in point of time, the various sciences are so mutually related that all must advance together, the simple ones taking the lead, and the concrete and more complex sciences, with their attendant arts, following behind.
As this natural order of dependence and development of the sciences is a great fact of nature, over which we have little or no control, and as a scheme for the simultaneous establishment of professorships of research in all the sciences, simple, complex, and