UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA.

ADDRESS

ON

THE OPENING OF THE SCHOOL OF MINES.

MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN-We assemble this evening to elect directors for the management of the School of Mines for Ballarat. It affords me much pleasure to assist on the occasion. My good fortune has associated me before this with the inhabitants of Ballarat in furthering the cause of voluntary mental improvement. Their zeal, discretion, and perseverance prepared me for the exhibition of similar invaluable qualities in the members of your provisional council: that expectation has been completely realised; and their exertions ably regulated by the good judgment and unwearied assiduity of your provisional vice-president, Judge Rogers, have matured within a short time, and in the face of many difficulties, the plan for the organisation of the school.

My first duty is to thank very heartily the gentlemen who initiated these proceedings for the honour they have conferred on me by naming me the provisional president, and to assure them, as well as the members of the provisional council, that I am very sensible of the distinction. Indeed, these gentlemen have left me nothing more to do now, and but little to say, because as the school has become, in the phraseology of the day, "an accomplished fact," it may be presumed that everything connected with its establishment and maintenance has been thoroughly debated and determined upon. Nevertheless, it is quite possible for an entire community to accept the conviction that it is expedient and desirable to open such a school, and yet it may not present itself to the minds of all that the maintenance in a

perfect state of efficiency will require something more substantial than their meed of approval of the project.

You may already have considered the advisability of making this a proprietary establishment. Such a system possesses numerous advantages, not the least of which is the direct pecuniary interest which the proprietors have in the good management. This has a talismanic effect on the regular attendance of directors.

You

You may reasonably expect that the Government will help you, more particularly as in other countries where such schools exist they originate with and are supported mainly at the cost of the State, and especially as you have proposed to give to the Crown the power of nominating six of the members of your council. You may for the like reason look for the support of the seven mining boards. may further rely, and with reasonable confidence, on the sympathies of many of the general public. Still something more is required. Liberal salaries must be provided for your masters, lecturers, and teachers; a library must be formed; collections of minerals, models, &c., must be made; other things indispensable for the course of instruction must be got together.

You will doubtless see the advantage of founding exhibitions for the encouragement of your pupils: the question of maintenance becomes consequently one which addresses itself earnestly to a much wider circle than the audience who honour us with their presence here to-night.

Although it be not probable that in this community, so forward to avail itself of opportunities to assist in enlightened movements, any will be found actually opposed to the establishment of this school, there may be some persons indifferent to change, and of that timid disposition which shrinks from the responsibility of supporting any novel scheme; or perhaps there may still linger amongst us a few of that courageous old conservative stamp who, long since driven from their outworks by the advancing waves of general education, still hold the citadel in defence of the practical man, and contend strongly that all goes on well enough as it is.

The first will meet us with the inquiry-What is the use of such an institution? When such questions were put to Benjamin Franklin, not unfrequently in the vein of petulant interrogation, depreciating the value of his scientific pursuits, the philosopher replied by asking another, "What is the use of a

baby?"

Indeed, as an abstract proposition it is not easy for any person, except the idolising mother or proud father, to pledge himself prospectively for the eventual utility of any individual infant. Yet Wordsworth has said:

"The child is father of the man ;"

Or, as was sung before by Milton

The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day.

And truly the culture of this scion, which is to be developed into a rational, accountable member of the body politic, clothed with his rights and duties, and his responsibilities here and hereafter, is deserving of our solicitude.

Those who have meditated on the subject have been made uneasy by the growing tendency to obliterate childhood to hurry on our youth either to drudgery for which the physical powers are unequal, or to occupations which induce an impatience of parental control-an independence for which it is not ripe; and disquieted by the fatal propensity to sharpen youths, who should be boys, into imperfect men. In no regions can uneasiness on this point be more keenly felt, than where the population lives in that state of chronic excitement caused by the search for gold, amongst which speculation is so rife, so stimulating, so contagious. Nowhere can the compensating influences of education be more required to moderate these precocious inclinations; and no kind of education can be devised better suited to calm the juvenile enthusiasm, to steady the volatile, and give a wholesome discipline to the mind, than a sound training in moral and physical science, in mathematics, engineering, geology, mineralogy, chemistry, and metallurgy, which we undertake to teach.

This simple statement would, of itself, suffice to show that the school is one of the best and most useful that the community could project. Your excellent prospectus, which has, it is hoped, had an extensive circulation, declares the uses which this school is expected to serve. Quoting from it, with your permission, it states :-"The object sought to be obtained is the combination of the highest scientific with the most practical training for all men engaged in the enterprise of mining in its various branches-whether so engaged as mining managers, engineers, surveyors, mechanists, working miners, directors, or promoters of companies."

"Hitherto in this colony no means of scientific education in this most important occupation has been provided. The result has been an enormous waste of capital, time, and labour. Indeed, it may be fairly stated that the present depression in the mining market, and the distrust of mining property as an investment, may in great part be traced to the numerous failures of enterprises either ignorantly entered upon or unscientifically conducted. The scientific education of those engaged in mining pursuits would, it is believed, not merely render gold-mining a safe and generally more productive speculation, but would bring into profitable prominence and activity many branches of mining now wholly neglected, or distrustfully, and consequently unsuccessfully, pursued.”

Here, then, is an exposition which completely exhausts the subject, and puts the question beyond the reach of controversy. For institutions, political, social, and educational, there is, as for mankind, an infancy; and you may be congratulated on the rapidity with which this has emerged from its swaddling-clothes. The sum of £600, wanted to enable you to commence operations, has been subscribed. The Government has so far recognised your movement as to grant you a lease, at a nominal rent, of the house in which we are met, formerly the building in which were held the sittings of the Supreme Court. It has been repaired and adapted to the requirements, and you are now ready to set to work.

If there be amongst us any indifferent to the movement on account of its novelty, to them may be said, with all deference for striking on so low a chord-You cannot afford to be listless-your self-interest demonstrates the imperative necessity for action. Your calling, whatever it may be, is so interwoven with, so dependent on, the mining for gold, which has enlisted so large a part of the population of the district, that the question is brought home to you in a serious light. You cannot decline to move on with the times.

Only sixteen years ago, when the valleys around this spot were crowded with upwards of 40,000 stalwart diggers, working amidst the alluvial drifts with an energy almost incredible, an admonition was given, which sounded prophetic, and was consequently disregarded; yet the verification of this has come upon us in our generation with a startling and unpleasant truthfulness.

Many a one of you, when consulting the author of Siluria, for guidance in your operations, to which his profound and philosophic

investigations have imparted such pre-eminent value, may have paid but scant attention to the conclusion of the sixteenth chapter. Let

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me read it to you. Speaking of these alluvial workings, he says:'Now, as every heap of these broken auriferous materials in foreign lands has as well defined a base as each gravel-pit of our own country, it is quite certain that hollows so occupied, whether in California or Australia, must be dug out and exhausted in a greater or less period. In fact, all similar deposits in the old or new world have had their gold abstracted from heaps whose areas have been traced, and whose bottoms were reached. Not proceeding beyond the evidences registered in the stone-book of nature, it may be therefore affirmed that the period of such exhaustion in each country (for the deposits are much shallower in some tracts than in others) will, in great measure, depend on the amount of population and the activity of the workmen employed in each locality. Anglo-Saxon energy, for example, as applied in California and Australia, may in a few years accomplish results which could only have been attained in centuries by a scanty and lazy indigenous population, and thus the present large flow of gold into Europe from such tracts will, in my opinion, begin to diminish within a comparatively short period."

These italics are his own. You may answer whether undue emphasis be thus given to the passage. What is the obvious moral to be drawn from this pregnant sentence? Does it not show that what has occurred on this spot within this short time, under our own eyes, proves amply that, in this quarter at least, the era of the cradle and the tin dish has already passed away into an antiquity as dim and distant as the age of Tubal Cain; that the present epoch of deep leads to reach the banks of what were at some remote geological period superficial streams, or to follow out, what may be of still more or less ancient formation, gold-bearing veins of quartz, demand agencies wholly different from those which hitherto sufficed; that while you will still rejoice to possess the help of the miner's brown arm, the time has come when the calculating and inventive brain and the cultivated intelligence must play their part; and that you now must enlist higher forms of sagacity, employ auxiliary forces, and that these forces must be directed to suit the altered circumstances which have arisen.

But our old and valued conservative friends, who conceive that new-fangled ways and contrivances are all weariness and vexation