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238 resident members to his country and home. It but illustrates the instability of human nature to find the Royal Society refuse to be used in the slightest manner to punish Franklin, who represented the bitterest hostility to George III and his ministry, and only a few years later demand the resignation of Dr. Joseph Priestley, who simply differed with the Established Church by demanding freedom of worship, and who differed with the Government by expressing sympathy for the American colonies and for the struggling French Republic. It counted little for Priestley that he had received the Copley medal for his electrical investigations and made it possible for chemistry to become a science by his discovery of oxygen. Priestley was a Non-conformist minister, and rendered himself intensely unpopular by continual debates with the Established clergy. His controversy with Dr. (afterward Bishop) Horsley was the most important theological controversy in the eighteenth century. In view of the invariable preferment given to Dr. Horsley and other opponents for their energy displayed in these contests, Priestley was led to make the stinging comment that he appointed the bishops of England. Hated and feared by the Established Church for his undoubted abilities and heresies, hated and feared by the Government for his dangerous political heresies, no protection was granted him when, upon the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, a mob burned to the ground his house, with all his manuscripts and apparatus, and to escape personal violence the now old man fled for refuge to America, where he spent the remainder of his life.

In 1779 Count Rumford, adventurer, soldier, and scientist, was elected Fellow. Sir Benjamin Thompson's life reads like a romance. A poor New England lad, he at the outbreak of the Revolution sailed to England, where he spent the greater part of his life. He held many positions of honor and trust, both in England and Bavaria, and displayed marked ability as a statesman and as a general. But he is chiefly remembered for his scientific attainments. He founded the Rumford medal of the Royal Society, and enjoyed the unique distinction of being its first recipient. In 1802 the society decided that the medal be given "to Benjamin Count Rumford for his various discoveries on the subject of heat and light," Rumford founded the Royal Institute, at London, for the study of these subjects, and many of England's greatest chemists and physicists have lectured here under its auspices.

Various papers upon physical optics were read before the society by Dr. Thomas Young, during 1801-3, containing his newly discovered law of interference of light, which led to the establishment of the undulatory theory of light. This discovery placed Young in the front rank of the natural philosophers of his day,