Page:History of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923).djvu/167

 1860-70] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 141 is given for deliberation and concerted action ; and any two Fellows could make known their joint opinions as to the persons most fit to be the Officers and Council of the Society without trouble or expense to themselves. For the election of Officers and Council in 1861, the Council received from six Fellows a requisition nominating John Lee, of Hartwell House, for the office of President ; the Council's choice for President was Airy. Accordingly the list was printed and circulated, in accordance with the new Bye-laws, in a form showing two nominations for the Presidency. The ballot resulted in the election of Lee as President and Airy as Vice-President, and the rest of the list as proposed by the Council. It is not easy now to understand the feeling in the Society that could have allowed the recommendation of the Council to be overridden. Airy had, it is true, already served three times as President. Lee was completing his 78th year at the time of his election. De Morgan, who had the welfare of the Society very much at heart, as is well shown by his two terms of eight years as Secretary and long service on the Council, could look at the humorous side of the matter in writing privately to Airy : " It is wondered that the Airy party, who must have had the wind, should have allowed the Society to fall to Leeward." But he took a very different line in letting the Society know what he thought of their action. He wrote to the Council, saying that he w r ould not accept the office of Vice-President, and requesting that his letter should be laid before the Society by being entered on the Minutes. It seems a long and laboured indictment, and few men would either press the analysis of the motives of their action to their bitter conclusion as De Morgan has done, or care to have it published. After much consideration as to whether it should be recorded here, it has seemed right not to print it. Mrs. De Morgan published it in full in her Memoir of Augustus De Morgan. London, 1882, pp. 272-278. In looking back now at the episode in the absence of any contemporaneous criticism, it almost seems as if De Morgan, in his warm advocacy of the traditional custom by which the Society had hitherto always followed the lead of the outgoing Council in the nomination of the incoming Council, may have misjudged the situation. The action of the Society is possibly to be attributed not so much to a wish to upset a tradition, but rather to a chivalrous desire to recognise Lee's frequent readiness to act as Chairman during the Presidency of George Bishop, who almost simultaneously with his election as President in 1857 had been overtaken by illness,