Genre:

Essay

Subjects:

Railways, Universities, Progress, Education

    Criticizes plans to construct a railway 'engine smithy' near the University of Oxford, an institution that has taken 'some six centuries to make' and which promises to be 'thickly veiled in smoke' if this workshop is established. Laments the possible disfigurement of the colleges and the deafening of Minerva by Vulcan. Concludes by asking the 'gentlemen of the Great Western' to keep Oxford as a place for manufacturing only academic products.