The Royal Society by Tinniswood Adrian;

Author:Tinniswood, Adrian; [Tinniswood, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

A meeting of the Society at Somerset House, c.1844. Members and visitors sit on benches facing the president; the mace rests on a table in the centre of the room. A voting box is being handed round.

© The Royal Society.

Babbage’s solution was for the Society to pay more attention to regulating the numbers admitted as Fellows, and ‘to make it an object of ambition to men of science to be elected into it’. He advocated distinguishing publicly between members who actually contributed papers to the Philosophical Transactions (in the late 1820s this amounted to 109 out of a total membership of 714), and those who didn’t, a plan which was rejected by the council on the grounds that those who didn’t wouldn’t like it.

Reflections on the Decline of Science appeared in May 1830. Babbage presented it at a stormy meeting of the Society on 20 May, when he was thanked – through gritted teeth, one imagines. At least the meeting wasn’t as dull as usual. One of those present wrote to The Times to ask if it was appropriate for the president to use the phrase ‘God in Heaven knows’, and John Herschel, a close friend to whom Babbage had shown a draft, said privately that he’d like to slap Babbage’s face. Babbage stopped attending the Society’s meetings.

There was more to come. In November the astronomer Sir James South published a savage little pamphlet entitled Charges Against the President and Council of the Royal Society. Some of South’s thirty-six charges echoed Babbage’s complaints. He accused Gilbert and the council of doctoring the minutes of council meetings and suppressing legitimate attempts to reform membership of the Society. But he also charged them with showing disrespect to the king ‘by presenting to those persons to whom such prizes were awarded, empty boxes in lieu of Royal Medals’; and squandering large sums on tavern bills – or, as he picturesquely put it, converting hundreds of pounds of the Society’s funds into ‘whitebait, rose water, and sauterne’.6

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