Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/41

Rh Mr. Panizzi, assumes, in the first place, that the Council was bound to pay him in advance the remuneration agreed upon for the completion of the Catalogue ; such payment in advance never having been for a moment contemplated. His payment was to have been at the rate of £30 for every thousand titles the Catalogue might contain; but, in consideration that the work would probably require along time to accomplish, it was agreed that one third of the money should be given to him when he had written out all the titles on slips of paper, another third when the revises were finally corrected for the press, and the remaining third when the whole was printed off. The total number of titles written out by Mr. Panizzi, as counted by Mr. Shuckard, by whose computation he consented to abide, was found to be 24,136; which at the rate of £10 per thousand, would render the sum he ought to have received at the present stage of his work, £241 7s. 2d., but from this sum £27:6s. is to be deducted in pay- ment of Mr. Roberton, as had been agreed to by Mr. Panizzi, re- ducing it to £214 1s. 2d. At the period when Mr. Panizzi discon- tinued the work he had already received from the Society 450 on account, which is more than double the sum to which he was then strictly entitled. The Council, therefore, far from imagining that he had any further claims on the Society, considered that in advancing him so large a sum before he had completed the second term of his engagement, they had rather erred on the side of liberality. They could never have had an idea that he expected any additional pay- ment, as he never gave them the slightest intimation to that effect; and it is not until after the lapse of sixteen months that he suddenly makes an appeal, not to the Council of the Royal Society, but to the public, by the circulation of a pamphlet, claiming further remunera- tion, which he has never applied for to the party from whom he imagines it to be due.

In the second place, Mr. Panizzi assumes that the slips and revises are his own property, and that the Council has no right to them; and to such a length does he carry this notion, that, even after he had ceased to be employed by the Council, he refused to give up the key of the drawers containing the slips, as if that key were his own pro- perty. He likewise still withholds the revises containing the remarks of the Members who had seen them, alleging, while accused by no- body, that they were necessary for his justification. He is evidently not warranted in complaining of Members pointing out what ap- peared to them to be errors, for if he had deemed this wrong he would not have done the very same thing in his pamphlet, wherein he subjects the sheets of a former Catalogue, not designed for publi- cation and in a very rough and unfinished state, to the ordeal of his severest criticism.

Another of Mr. Panizzi's unwarranted assumptions is his fancying himself at liberty to execute the work on which he was employed in whatever manner he pleased. The Council certainly never delegated to him this power; but appointed a Committee for the express purpose of superintending the work as it proceeded, and of regulating the manner in which it should be printed: and it was the