Years ago, a change took place which would alone have {29} put a sufficient difficulty in the way. The co-operative body got tired of getting funds from and lending name to persons who had little or no science, and wanted F.R.S. to be in every case a Fellow Really Scientific. Accordingly, the number of yearly elections was limited to fifteen recommended by the Council, unless the general body should choose to elect more; which it does not do. The election is now a competitive examination: it is no longer--Are you able and willing to promote natural knowledge; it is--Are you one of the upper fifteen of those who make such claim. In the list of candidates--a list rapidly growing in number--each year shows from thirty to forty of those whom Newton and Boyle would have gladly welcomed as fellow-laborers. And though the rejected 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 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