MY DEAR GROVE,--... As to the Royal Society, you know my feeling towards it is for what it has been, and I hope may be. Its present state is not wholesome. You are aware that I am not on the council, and have not been for years, and have been to no meeting there for years; but I do hope for better times. I do not wonder at your feeling--all I meant to express was a wish that its circumstances and character should improve, and that it should again become a desirable reunion of _all_ really scientific men. It has done much, is now doing much, in some parts of science, as its magnetic observations show, and I hope will some day become altogether healthy. Ever, my dear Grove, yours sincerely, M. FARADAY. Though he continued down to 1860 to send researches for publication to the Royal Society, he seldom attended its meetings.[56] He was not even present in November, 1845, on the occasion of the reading of his paper on the action of the magnet on light. In 1857 he declined the Presidency, though urged by the unanimous wish of the Council, as narrated on p. 225. Though in the meridian of his active life, he took no part in the founding of the British Association in 1831, but was at the Oxford meeting in 1832, being one of the four scientific men (p. 65) selected to receive the honorary degree of D.C.L. on that occasion. He also communicated a paper on Electro-chemical Decomposition to the B.A. meeting at Cambridge in 1833. He acted as president of the Chemical Section of the Association in 1837 at Liverpool, and in 1846 at Southampton; and he was chosen as vice-president of the Association itself in the years 1844, at York (p. 224); 1849, at Birmingham (p. 256); and 1853, at Hull. He delivered evening discourses in 1847, at Oxford, on Magnetic and Diamagnetic Phenomena; and in 1849, at Birmingham, on Mr. Gassiot’s Battery. He also contributed to the proceedings at the meetings at Ipswich in 1851 and at Liverpool in 1854.