Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/347

 us. vi. OCT. 12, i9i2.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Banks in always wearing full court dress when he occupied the chair. Dr. Davy in the Life of his brother says :

" It was Sir Humphry's wish to have seen the Royal Society an efficient establishment for all the great purposes of Science, similar to the college contemplated by Bacon, having subordinate to it the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for Astro- nomy, and the British Museum for Natural History, in its most extensive acceptation."

During Davy's tenure of office great progress was made in science, and no wonder, with such men as Faraday, Herschel, Airy, Sabine, Young, and Wollaston, who all contributed papers. Only a few days after Davy had been elected to the chair Faraday sent his first paper, the subject being ' On Two New Compounds of Chlorine and Carbon.' The learned chemist in a letter to Weld wrote : "I was at that time but a little man amongst other philosophers."

On the death of George IV. the claims of the Royal Astronomical Society had to be recognized, and the Royal Society ceased to be the sole Visitors of the Royal Obser- vatory. The first royal warrant issued by William IV. constituted the Board of Visitors as follows : the President of the Royal Society (Chairman), six Fellows who have been named by a President, and who are then members for life ; the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and six Fellows of that Society with similar conditions ; and the Plumian and Lowndean Professors at Cambridge, and the Savilian Professor at Oxford. The ex-Presidents who had been members remained members.

On the 1st of April, 1823, the Royal Society received a letter from the Treasury requesting the Council to take into con- sideration a plan which had been sub- mitted to Government by Babbage for " applying machinery to the purposes of calculating and printing mathematical tables." The negotiations and experiments in reference to this came to an end, so far as the Government was concerned, on the 3rd of November, 1842, when regret was expressed at the " necessity of abandoning the machine on which so much scientific ingenuity and labour had been bestowed " ; but the expense necessary to bring about a satisfactory result was more than the Govern- ment felt justified in incurring. In 1843, on the application of the trustees of King's College, London, the machine, enclosed in a glass case, was removed to their museum. Weld says :

"It is capable of calculating to five figures, and two orders of differences, and performs the

work with absolute precision ; but no portion whatever of printing machinery, which was one of the great objects in the construction of the engine, exists."

The machine was later transferred to South Kensington.

In recent years machines for adding, multiplying, &c., have been largely adopted by banks and commercial houses, but these,, though extremely ingenious, are far less complicated than Babbage's " difference engine." (See ' Calculating Machines ' in the new edition of ' The Encyclopaedia Britannica.')

Charles Robert Weld, whose ' History of the Royal Society ' I have found most useful, was Assistant Secretary from the 14th of December, 1843, till the 2nd of May, 1861 ; and while the Society had rooms at Somerset House, he was constantly at the office of The Athenaeum, to which he was long a valued contributor. Science- was his true vocation, and it was on the friendly advice of Sir John Barrow that he- became Assistant Secretary to the Royal Society. Weld was the chief helper of Sir- John Franklin in the home work connected with his Arctic explorations, and, when no news of him was received, rejoiced at the- enthusiasm with which The Athenaeum constantly urged the Government to send expeditions in search of him. During the whole of the year 1843 public anxiety was very great, and The Athenaeum said : " Nothing ought to be omitted or postponed which the real circumstances of the case demanded." On the 27th of November it had the satisfaction of announcing that three expeditions were to be dispatched to the Arctic regions. Many years afterwards .. when the offices of The Athenaeum and ' N. & Q.' were removed from Wellington Street to Took's Court, I found copies of the former addressed to Franklin and others of the expedition ready to be sent out no doubt by the instructions of Lady Franklin.

Weld very kindly, at my father's request, once gave a lecture on his favourite subject. Arctic expeditions and the search for Sir John Franklin, to the men who then lived in " the Kitchens " of St. Giles's. He took Lady Franklin with him, and, when it became known that she was present, the men gave her a hearty ovation. Weld died at Bath on Friday, the 15th of January r 1869, JOHN COLLINS FRANCIS.

(To be continued.)