The Irish Academy has some of this fault. It endeavours to unite antiquarianism and abstract science. Its meetings are alternately entertained with mathematics and history, and its transactions are equally comprehensive. We yield to none in anxiety for the promotion of antiquarian studies; we think the public and the government disgraced by the slight support given to the Academy. We are not a little proud of the honour and strength given to our country by the science of MacCullagh, Hamilton, and Lloyd; but we protest against the attempt to mix the armoury of the ancient Irish, or the Celtic dialects, or the essay on Round Towers, with trigonometry and the calculus, whether in a lecture-room or a book.
Let us just set down, as we find them, some of the Literary and Scientific Institutions. There are the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal Irish Academy (we wish these royalties were dropped—no one minds them), the Irish Archæological Society, the Royal Zoological Society, the Geological Society, the Dublin Natural History Society, the Dublin Philosophical Society, the Royal Agricultural Society, etc., etc. Now, we take it that these bodies might be usefully reduced to three, and if three moderate government grants were made under conditions rewarding such a classification, we doubt not it would instantly be made.
In the first place, we would divorce from the Irish Academy the scientific department, requiring Trinity College to form some voluntary organisation for the purpose. To this non-collegiate philosophers should be admitted, and, thus disencumbered, we would devote the Academy to antiquities and literature—incorporate with it the Archæological Society—transfer to it all the antiques (of which it had not duplicates) in Trinity College, the Dublin Society, etc., and enlarge its museums and meeting-room. Its section of "polite literature" has long been a name—it should be made real. There would be nothing inconvenient or strange in finding in its lecture-rooms or transactions the antiquities and literature of Ireland, diversified by general historical, critical, and æsthetical researches.
The Dublin Society would reasonably divide into two sections. One, for the promotion of husbandry, might be aggrandised by tempting the Agricultural Society to join it, and should have a permanent museum, an extensive farm, premiums, shows, publications, and special lecturers. The second section, for the encouragement of manufactures, should have its museum, workshops, and experiment ground (the last, perhaps, as the agricultural farm), and its special lecturers. The library might well be joint, and managed by a joint committee, having separate funds. The general lecturers on chemistry and other such subjects might be paid in common. The drawing school (save that for pattern and machine drawing) might be transferred to the Art Institution; and the botanic garden and museum of minerals to a third body we propose.
This third body we would form from a union of the Zoological, the Geological, the Natural History, and all other such societies, and endow it with the Botanic and Zoological Gardens—give it rooms for a general and for a specially Irish museum, and for lecture-rooms in town, and supply it with a small fund to pay lecturers, who should go through the provinces.
We are firmly convinced that this re-arrangement of the Institutions of Dublin is quite practicable, would diminish unproductive expenses, economise the time, and condense the purposes of our literary, scientific, and artistical men, and increase enormously the use of the institutions to the public.
Of course the whole plan will be laughed at as fanciful and improbable; we think it easy, and we think it will be done.
IRELAND'S PEOPLE, LORDS, GENTRY, COMMONALTY.
When we are considering a country's resources and its fitness for a peculiar destiny, its people are not to be overlooked. How much they think, how much they work, what are their passions, as well as their habits, what are their hopes and what their history, suggest inquiries as well worth envious investigation as even the inside of a refugee's letter.