Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/150

 126 HISTORY OF THE [1850-60 In fact, the whole process of removing a Fellow's name from the list on account of failure to pay his dues was then a much more formidable affair than at present. Failing to get any satisfaction at a personal visit, the Treasurer was obliged to recommend expulsion, a ceremony carried out with the utmost publicity at a Special General Meeting called for the express purpose. Nowadays the Council is more charitable, and recognising that a failure to pay may be due more to misfortune than to malice, allows the name to disappear quietly from the roll without publicity. The remaining years of our decade call for little notice. Bishop served the usual two years as President without ever once taking the chair owing to ill-health, and was replaced in 1859 ^Y the Rev. Robert Main, who in the following year succeeded Johnson as Radcliffe Observer. Among new members of Council we may note A. Cayley, the famous algebraist, and A. R. Clarke, the geodesist. Admiral Smyth, the author of A Cycle of Celestial Objects, returned once more to the Council which he had served so well in previous years. During the whole period the two publications of the Society, the Memoirs and the Monthly Notices, grew in size and importance, and may justly be said to have contained almost everything of any permanent value in astronomy that was published in Great Britain. An old dispute, even in recent years not quite dead, as to the relative position as regards publications of scientific papers between the Royal Society on the one hand and the specialised Societies on the other, arose somewhat acutely at this time. The story of Sir Joseph Banks and his jealousy at the founding of the Astronomical and other societies has already been told in an earlier section of this history. Long after his time it was, however, still held by many claimants on behalf of the premier society that they had an absolute right to the publication of all scientific memoirs of the first order of importance, and that the others could only claim either work of second-rate merit or, if they cared to do so, might produce abstracts of work already issued by the Royal Society. It need hardly be pointed out that no question of claim or right arises. Anybody is entitled to send his papers to any Society of which he is a Fellow, failing that, he must get a Fellow to present it on his behalf, and the choice as to which Society he selects rests exclusively with him. It has never been seriously proposed, though we do not doubt that many of the out-and-out upholders of the extreme claims of the Royal Society would have supported it, that the Council of a Society such as the Astronomical should, if they judge a paper to be of sufficient merit, pass it on to the Royal Society for publication. No upper limit has ever been set, or could conceivably ever have been set, to the quality