of one year may be the accepted of the next—or of the next but one, or but two, if self-respect will permit the candidate to hang on—yet the time is clearly coming when many of those who ought to be welcomed will be excluded for life, or else shelved at, last, when past work, with a scientific peerage. Coupled with this attempt to create a kind of order of knighthood is an absurdity so glaring that it should always be kept before the general eye. This distinction, this mark set by science upon successful investigation, is of necessity a class-distinction. Rowan Hamilton, one of the greatest names of our day in mathematical science, never could attach F.R.S. to his name—he could not afford it. There is a condition precedent—Four Red Sovereigns. It is four pounds a year, or—to those who have contributed to the Transactions—forty pounds down. This is as it should be: the Society must be supported, But it is not as it should be that a kind of title of honour should be forged, that a body should take upon itself to confer distinctions for science, when it is in the background—-and kept there when the distinction is trumpeted— that the wearer is a man who can spare four pounds a year. I am well aware that in England a person who is not gifted, either by nature or art, with this amount of money power, is, a the mass, a very second-rate sort of Newton, whatever he may be in the field of investigation. Even men of science, so called, have this feeling. I know that the scientific advisers of the Admiralty, who, years ago, received 100l. a year each for his trouble, were sneered at by a wealthy pretender as 'fellows to whom a hundred a year is an object.' Dr. Thomas Young was one of them. To a bookish man—I mean a man who can manage to collect books— there is no tax. To myself, for example, 40l. worth of books deducted from my shelves, and the life-use of the Society's splendid library instead, would have been a capital exchange. But there may be, and are, men who want books, and cannot pay the Society's price. The Council would be very liberal in allowing their books to be consulted. I have no doubt that if a known investigator were to call and ask to look at certain books, the Assistant-Secretary would forthwith seat him with the books before him, absence of F.R.S. not in any wise withstanding. But this is not like having the right to consult any book on any day, and to take it away, i farther wanted.
So much for the Royal Society as concerns myself. I must add, that there is not a spark of party feeling against those who wilfully remain outside. The better minds of course know better; and the smaller savants look complacently on the idea of an
