ccessful 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 honor 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, {30} is, with 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
100 pounds 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, 40 pounds 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 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, if 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 outer world which makes _elite_ of them. I
have done such a thing as serve on a committee of the Society, and report
on a paper: they had the sense to ask, and I had the sense to see that none
of my opinions were compromised by compliance. And I will be of a