some of them are scarcely past their prime. It is a wonderful galaxy of stars of the first magnitude, and even should no other such names come in after-time, England's place among the scientific constellations is secure. But now as we turn to the souvenirs of Cooke and Wollaston and Davy the scene shifts by a hundred years. We are standing now in the closing epoch of the eighteenth century. These again are troublous times. The great new colony in the West has just broken off from the parent swarm. Now all Europe is in turmoil. The French war-cloud casts its ominous shadow everywhere. Even in England mutterings of the French Revolution are not without an echo. The spirit of war is in the air. And yet, as before, the spirit of science also is in the air. The strain of the political relations does not prevent a perpetual exchange of courtesy between scientific men and scientific bodies of various nations. Davy's dictum that "science knows no country" is perpetually exemplified in practice. And at the Royal Society, to match the great figures that were upon the scene a century before, there are such men as the eccentric Cavendish, the profound Wollaston, the marvellously versatile Priestley, and the equally versatile and even keener-visioned Rumford. Here, too, are Herschel, who is giving the world a marvellous insight into the constitution of the universe; and Hutton, who for the first time gains a clear view of the architecture of our earth's crust; and Jenner, who is rescuing his fellow-men from the clutches of the most deadly of plagues; to say nothing of such titanic striplings as Young and Davy, who are just entering the scientific lists. With such a company about us we are surely justified in feeling that the glory of England as a scientific centre has not dimmed in these first hundred and thirty years of the Royal Society's existence.