a fact that the thing was always done, as well as that it ought to be done.
Of late years this pretension has been made by a President of the Society. In 1855, Lord Rosse presented a confidential memorandum to the Council on the expediency of enlarging their number. He says, 'In a Council so small it is impossible to secure a satisfactory representation of the leading scientific Societies, and it is scarcely to be expected that, under such circumstances, they will continue to publish inferior papers while they send the best to our Transactions.'
And, again, with all the Societies represented on the Council, 'even if every Science had its Society, and if they published everything, withholding their best papers [i.e., from the Royal Society], which they would not be likely to do, still there would remain to the Royal Society…" Lord Rosse seems to imagine that the minor Societies themselves transfer their best papers to the Royal Society; that if, for instance, the Astronomical Society were to receive from A. B. a paper of unusual merit, the Society would transfer it to the Royal Society. This is quite wrong: any preference of the Royal to another Society is the work of the contributor himself. But it shows how well hafted is the Royal Society's claim, that a President should acquire the notion that it is acknowledged and acted upon by the other Societies, in their joint and corporate capacities. To the pretension thus made I never could give any sympathy. When I first heard Mr. Christie, Sec. R. S., set it forth at the anniversary dinner of the Astronomical Society, I remembered the Baron in Walter Scott—
Saying, Give thy best steed as a vassal ought.
And I remembered the answer—
I can rein Buck's-foot better than thou.
Fully conceding that the Royal Society is entitled to preeminent rank and all the respect due to age and services, I could not, nor can I now, see any more obligation in a contributor to send his best to that Society than he can make out to be due to himself. This pretension, in my mind, was hooked on, by my historical mode of viewing things already mentioned, to my knowledge of the fact that the Royal Society—the chief fault, perhaps, lying with its President, Sir Joseph Banks—had sternly set itself against the formation of other societies; the Geological
