for among the contributing members during his term of office were Herschel, Buckland, Young, Dalton, Babbage, Brewster, and Faraday.
King George IV, in 1825, showed his interest in the Royal Society by proposing to award two gold medals, to be known as the Royal medals. The society accepted the proposal, and in the following year the first prize was bestowed upon John Dalton, of Manchester, "for the development of the chemical theory of definite proportions, usually called the atomic theory, and for his labors and discoveries in physical and chemical science."
The laws enunciated by Dalton upon the atomic theory are the greatest generalizations in chemistry, and at once placed it among the exact sciences. Dalton had an analytical, experimental turn of mind; patient, persevering, and painstaking, supreme in the laboratory, but almost destitute of social and literary instincts. When asked why he did not marry, he replied that he never had the time. One who had not time to seek a wife would not likely have the time nor the desire to seek general culture. So we are not surprised to hear him say that his entire library could be carried upon his back, and scarcely half of these had he read.
Dalton always wore the plain, colorless garb of the Friends, and only once appeared in public otherwise. When he was in London in 1834 his friends desired to present him to the king, but he refused to invest himself in the court-dress. He went arrayed in the scarlet doctor's robe, perfectly unconscious of the brilliancy of his attire; he was a victim of his friends' innocent conspiracy, for Dalton was color-blind.
In 1864 the Royal Society, through its president, Major-General Sabine, awarded the Copley medal to Charles Darwin, the author of the "Origin of Species," The president highly eulogized the merits of his works, "stamped throughout with the impress of the closest attention to minute details and accuracy of observation, combined with large powers of generalization," In 1839, upon his return from his voyage on the Beagle, the young naturalist, for his excellent papers on volcanic phenomena, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and at the anniversary meeting of the society in November, 1853, the Royal medal was presented him for his masterly treatise on "Coral Reefs." So, when the "Origin of Species" appeared, it was not from an unknown author, but one who had already attained a world-wide reputation. But no man's reputation, however great, could have saved so revolutionary a work as the "Origin" from the most violent opposition. It called forth grave reviews, satires, wit, even personal vituperation; but Darwin, in his rural home in Kent, received it all in a philosophic spirit, and abided his time. The "Origin of
