the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its
meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel
before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were
inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would
have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous _x_ Club, a name
singularly appropriate on the principle of _lucus a non lucendo_ to a
club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth.
Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society
being no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--"we finally
accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the _x_
Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have
no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by
acclamation."

Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends,
Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John
Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution.
George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of
Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after
the return of the _Rattlesnake_ to England. Herbert Spencer, the
philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends
of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry
at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of
Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards
Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich,
entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William
Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member,
elected by the rest at the first meeting.

Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the
articles to a scientific Encyclopaedia: six were Presidents of the
British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France;
and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign
Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting
though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it
was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the
scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all
animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the
great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but
one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence
on the progress