Earnest students anxious to acquire a practical knowledge suited to the trade of the district: The growth and development of the Mechanics’ Institute Movement with particular reference to Huddersfield 1824 – 1890

The mechanics' institute movement of the British Isles has been underrated by some historians, who have argued that many of the institutes were attended by the middle and upper classes. In any case, they state that by the 1850s, they were declining in both popularity and usefulness. This paper questions these assumptions, concentrating on the developments at the Huddersfield Mechanics' Institute and comparing with other institutes both locally and nationally its responsiveness to local and national developments with regard to its contribution to education. Like many other institutes, Huddersfield provided a foundation on which twentieth-century further education was firmly established. Britain was not the only country to establish a mechanics' institute movement as similar developments were also taking place in other countries, particularly in Australia

Stochastic models for mainland-island metapopulations in static and dynamic landscapes

This paper has three primary aims: to establish an effective means for modelling mainland-island metapopulations inhabiting a dynamic landscape; to investigate the effect of immigration and dynamic changes in habitat on metapopulation patch occupancy dynamics; and to illustrate the implications of our results for decision-making and population management. We first extend the mainland-island metapopulation model of Alonso and McKane [Bull. Math. Biol. 64:913-958, 2002] to incorporate a dynamic landscape. It is shown, for both the static and the dynamic landscape models, that a suitably scaled version of the process converges to a unique deterministic model as the size of the system becomes large. We also establish that, under quite general conditions, the density of occupied patches, and the densities of suitable and occupied patches, for the respective models, have approximate normal distributions. Our results not only provide us with estimates for the means and variances that are valid at all stages in the evolution of the population, but also provide a tool for fitting the models to real metapopulations. We discuss the effect of immigration and habitat dynamics on metapopulations, showing that mainland-like patches heavily influence metapopulation persistence, and we argue for adopting measures to increase connectivity between this large patch and the other island-like patches. We illustrate our results with specific reference to examples of populations of butterfly and the grasshopper Bryodema tuberculata.J. V. Ros

Education, Utopia and the limits of enlightenment

In many recent explanations of the rise of modernity, Scotland has been cited as an illustration of the relationship between the growth of mass education and the influence of the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress. This article questions the prevailing account of the advance of education in Scotland by highlighting the impact upon it of utopian concepts of education and society from which Scottish Enlightenment thought recoiled. Originating in the radical theology of the Scottish Reformation, the utopian theme in Scottish culture has been a constant source of renewal and reproach, testing the limits of Enlightenment consensus and positing compelling alternatives to dominant educational practice