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THE ENDOWMENT OF RESEARCH.

“GOVERNMENT FUND OF £4000 FOR THE PROMOTION or SCIENTIFIC RESEAHCH.—The President and Council of the Royal Society have resolved to advise the Committee of Council on Education to expend the above-named Fund in aiding Scientific Research :—l. By conferring grants on Competent Persons, or by offering Prizes of considerable value for the solution of Problems. 2. By meeting applications from Persons desirous of undertaking Investigations. 3. By applying Funds for Computation, the Formation of Tables of Constants, and other laborious and unremunerative Scientific work.
—Appheations are to be addressed to the Secretaries of the Royal Society, Burlington House, London, W., marked [Government Fund].”
This announcement has naturally produced great excitement in the Scientific World. The letter-box of the Royal Society is daily choked with applications. We append a few of the more remarkable of these appeals.
GRNTLEMRN, -
Eon years pact I have consecrated all my leisure to perfecting a discovery which will produce results beyond the power of the most Oriental imagination to realise. I am as certain as I am of the rise of to-morrow’s sun, or the visit of the tax-collector, that a grant of £50—or, to prevent the possibility of failure, say £100— would enable me to bring my experiments to a successful issue, and confer on the Royal Society the enviable distinction of having been the medium of revealing to the world a long latent secret.—I mean that of Perpetual Motion.
88, Chimera Crescent, !N TV. P. GREEN MOONING.
DEAR SIR, Jan. 6, 1877.
I uvv not slept a moment, for pardonahlo excitement since I read of the intentions of our glorious, great-hearted, chivalrous Government, to grant £4000 for Scientific Research. A cheque for £150 (not crossed) will put me in possession of the means of procuring apparatus and chemicals, the only things wanting to enable me to complete the last link in a chain of experiments which will, which shall, which must culminate in the transmutation of all the baser metals into genuine, solid, virgin GOLD.
Yours in haste (for the Laboratory waits),
2A, Little Stickleback Street, B. EUPE0REIU5 WnIsraEToN.
276, Dock Avenue, Liverpool,
GENTLEMEN, 5/1/77.
PEAl use your influence with the Government to get me awarded a grant of £500 to £1000, to aid me in showing that She whole system of Modern Astronomy is radically wrong. The prevailing notions of the configuration of the earth (ridiculously called one of the heavenly bodies), the composition of the sun and its distance from our globe, and the absence of life in the moon, I have over and over again proved to the satisfaction of myself and my friends, to be as gross delusions as the belief in the philosopher’s stone and the divining rod of former ages. I only require the trifle I have mentioned to put my convictions on such a base of absolute certainty, that the world shall hail me as the greatest Scientific Reformer since the days of COPERNICUS, GALILEO, and TYCHO BRAHE.
Yours,
TRALES ALExANDER WILDEE5PIN.
GENTLEMEN,
I AM ready to sell to the Government my infallible specifies for sea-sickness and hydrophobia, which hare never been known to fail since my great-grandfather first brought the prescriptions with him from the Vale of Cashmere. My terms are £4000 cash.
Your obedient Servant,
Isle of Dogs, B., Jan. 1, 1877. ANDREW Rho CANNIE.
Mv DEAR Sins, The Crib, James Wattville, Manchester.
A NEW motive power is within my grasp, which will render steam as obsolete as the pack-horse and the stage-waggon. I am impeded in my experiments by the want of means to procure material, machinery, skified labour, and workshops. I want but onl £2000 for all this. Plead for me for a grant to that amount, an you will place me (and yourselves) on the same pedestal of fame as ARCHIMEDES, WATT, and the STEPHENSONS.
6/1/77. ARCHIMEDES 3. STEOWGRA55.
Miss KATHLEEN O’COEXEI is anxious to engage in the following computations
1. The number of penny postage-stamps it would take to go round the world.
2. The number and cost of the umbrellas now in nse in Great Britain and Ireland.
3. The value of the waste paper annually burnt or thrown away in Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales.
She trusts the Government will allow her an annuity of £250 until her calculations are completed.
Thomas Moore Street, Dublin. Friday Evening.