An important distinction exists between scientific communications, which seems to have escaped the notice of the Councils of the Royal Society. They may contain discoveries of new principles,--of laws of nature hitherto unobserved; or they may consist of a register of observations of known phenomena, made under new circumstances, or in new and peculiar situations on the face of our planet. Both these species of additions to our knowledge are important; but their value and their rarity are very different in degree. To make and to repeat observations, even with those trifling alterations, which it is the fashion in our country (in the present day) to dignify with the name of discoveries, requires merely inflexible candour in recording precisely the facts which nature has presented, and a power of fixing the attention on the instruments employed, or phenomena examined,--a talent, which can be much improved by proper Instruction, and which is possessed by most persons of tolerable abilities and education.* To discover new principles, and to detect the undiscovered laws by which nature operates, is another and a higher task, and requires intellectual qualifications of a very different order: the labour of the one is like that of the computer of an almanac; the inquiries of the other resemble more the researches of the accomplished analyst, who has invented the formula: by which those computations are performed. [*That the use even of the large astronomical instruments in a national observatory, does not require any very profound acquirements, is not an opinion which I should have put forth without authority. The Astronomer-Royal ought to be the best judge. On the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society, for April 6, 1826, with reference to the Assistants necessary for the two mural circles, we find a letter from Mr. Pond on the subject, from which the following passage is extracted: "But to carry on such investigations, I want indefatigable, hard-working, and above all, obedient drudges (for so I must call them, although they are drudges of a superior order), men who will be contented to pass half their day in using their hands and eyes in the mechanical act of observing, and the remainder of it in the dull process of calculation."] Such being the distinction between the merits of these inquiries, some difference ought to exist in the nature of any rewards that may be proposed for their encouragement. The Royal Society have never marked this difference, and consequently those honorary medals which are given to observations, gain a value which is due to those that are given for discoveries; whilst these latter are diminished in their estimation by such an association.