_The Whittingham Charity_, distributed at St. James's, Ashted, in March,
furnishes gifts to about eighty poor people (principally widows), who
receive blankets, sheets, quilts, flannel, &c., in addition to bread and
coal.
~Philosophical Society.~--A society with this name was formed in 1794
for the promulgation of scientific principles among mechanics. Its
meetings were held in an old warehouse in the Coach Yard, and from the
fact that many workmen from the Eagle Foundry attended the lectures,
delivered mainly by Mr. Thomas Clarke, the members acquired the name of
"the cast-iron philosophers." Another society was formed in 1800, for
the diffusion of scientific knowledge amongst the middle and higher
classes, and by the year 1814 it was possessed of a handsome Lecture
Theatre, a large Museum, with good collections of fossils and minerals,
a Library, Reading Room, &c., in Cannon Street. Like many other useful
institutions of former days, the philosophical has had to give way to
the realistic, its library of dead men's writings, and its fossils of
the ancient world, vanishing in face of the reporters of to-day's
doings, the ubiquitous throbs of the "Walter" and "Hoe" steam presses
resounding where erst the voice of Science in chronicling the past
foreshadowed the future.
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