Some years ago I met a distinguished foreigner on his first visit to London. He said: “What a strange people you are in England! Your country has given birth to some of the greatest leaders of modern thought. Had we been fortunate enough to call them compatriots, their monuments would have been conspicuous in our towns, the public places of our capital would have borne their honoured names. I have traversed London,” he pursued, “without once being reminded that I was in the country of Darwin and of Spencer; the name even of Newton met my eye only at the corner of a back street off Holborn.”
I did my best to explain the apparent paradox. I traced in detail the principles of English street nomenclature; I urged the probability that the Newton of High Holborn was not the author of the Principia, but a local builder; I pointed out that a London statue was the very last form of memorial a philosopher would wish for; but my companion went away only half satisfied, and left me, to speak frankly, as unconvinced as himself.
One cannot in candour deny that the contrast is somewhat odd between the commanding position in the history of science which England owes to the labours of a few of her gifted sons and the attitude of comparative indifference which the mass of contemporary Englishmen display, I will not say merely to the personal fame of their illustrious pioneers, but in general to the entire question of the advance of scientific knowledge within their bounds, and to the development of the means of national education which that advance demands.
Elsewhere in civilized Europe we are made conscious of a franker public recognition of the change that the last century made in the conditions of the modern world; of the extent to which the cultivation of exact knowledge has revolutionized the requirements of public and private business; and of the obligations and necessities which the new order of things has imposed on the community. Elsewhere than among ourselves it is not thought a strange thing that the resources of a State should be employed to extend the bounds of abstract knowledge; elsewhere we see the organization of education no less an object of government than the ordering of the police or the control of the highway. Even in comparatively poor countries we find scientific knowledge and trained intellects regarded as sound public investments, and the popular voice applauding a liberal application of public money to secure them. (BMJ 1904;i: 1177)
Sir Isambard Owen