=Society of Arts and Exhibitions.=--In April, 1814, the “artists and amateurs,” proposed to form a society, and to hold an annual exhibition of pictures, and the promoters secured as honorary members, Benjamin West, Sir J. Soane, J. M. W. Turner, John Flaxman, and Richard Westmacott. The first exhibition was held in the “Academy of Arts,”--a building still remaining in Union Passage--and proved very attractive. In 1821, the Artistic Society proposed to expand and to form a Society of Arts, and in 1822, the site of the present large building (then temporary) was secured, and replaced, in 1827, by a permanent building, chiefly from the liberality of Sir Robert Lawley, who gave a large number of casts from antique, and in that year the first great exhibition of pictures was held. As a proof of the necessity of such an exhibition and of such a Society, it will be worth while to quote the remarks of Catherine Hutton, the daughter of the historian, herself a woman of good sense and good taste, since she predicted that the proposed society would “die a natural death,” that the “genius of the artists of Birmingham was more calculated to paint tea boards than pictures,” and that the proposed rooms would soon “serve for a Methodist Meeting House.” For more than sixty years since that prophecy, the rooms have been used, with one interval, caused by quarrels, for a series of exhibitions of paintings and drawings, not only in autumn, but in spring exhibitions too, which secure some of the best pictures by the foremost artists of the day. =School of Medicine and Surgery.=--In 1828, the School of Medicine and Surgery was begun in Snow Hill, by the late W. Sands Cox, and was finally expanded into the Queen’s College, which has been fully described, but the “Society” side of this and other similar institutions, was originally a series of meetings of members, and not any sort of college or school.