238 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



guished resident members to his country and home. It but illus- 

 trates 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 Gov- 

 ernment 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 investiga- 

 tions 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 dis- 

 played 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 Rumforcl, adventurer, soldier, and scientist, was 

 elected Fellow. Sir Benjamin Thompson's life reads like a ro- 

 mance. 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 Eng- 

 land 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 So- 

 ciety, and enjoyed the unique distinction of being its first recipi- 

 ent. In 1802 the society decided that the medal be given" to Ben- 

 jamin 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 so- 

 ciety by Dr. Thomas Young, during 1801-3, containing his newly 

 discovered law of interference of light, which led to the establish- 

 ment of the undulatory theory of light. This discovery placed 

 Young in the front rank of the natural philosophers of his day, 



