vantages of a crowded home, Joseph Priestley was adopted
and educated by a wealthy and noble aunt. So well was his
education attended to, that at the age of twenty-two he was
conversant with French, German, Italian, Latin, Hebrew,
Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, and Arabic, nor was his knowledge
of mathematics in any way deficient. Of his aunt’s gener
osity, Priestley says: “My aunt spared no expense in my
education, and that was doing more for me than giving me
an estate.”
We now find Priestley starting out to flight life's bat
tles, single handed, as a Unitarian preacher. His success
as a preacher and writer, his advanced theological and pol
itical views caused the common people to conceive a burning
hatred for him, for they saw him not through the lens of
broad intelligence but rather through the lens of bigotry
and depravity. In the cause of right he feared no foe and
took the field against all comers. The Archbishop of Can
terbury; the great orator, Burke; the renowned Blackstone'
and the Board of Longitude, all came under the ban of his
pen. “Oratory and Criticism,” “A Theory of Language,”
“Constitution and Laws of England,” “Education,” “The
French Revolution” and “The American War” are but a
few of his many works. He was, beyond doubt, one of the
most voluminous writers that England ever produced. No
man ever covered a greater field of knowledge in his works
than did Joseph Priestley, the physiologist, the electrician,
the inathematician, the logician, the moralist, the theolo
gian, the mental philosopher and the political economist.
“It seems to me,” said Priestley in his work on Education,
“a defect in our present system of public education that a
proper course of studies is. not provided for gentlrmen who
are designed to fill the principal stations of active life, dis
tinct from those which are adapted to the learned profes
sions.” This* the call for technical institutions such
as the one which to-day becomes more near and dear to us