240 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for among the contributing members during his term of office 

 were Herschel, Buckland, Young, Dalton, Babbage, Brewster, and 

 Faraday. 



King George IV, in 1825, showed his interest in the Royal 

 Society by proposing to award two gold medals, to be known as 

 the Royal medals. The society accepted the proposal, and in the 

 following year the first prize was bestowed upon John Dalton, of 

 Manchester, " for the development of the chemical theory of defi- 

 nite proportions, usually called the atomic theory, and for his 

 labors and discoveries in physical and chemical science." 



The laws enunciated by Dalton upon the atomic theory are 

 the greatest generalizations in chemistry, and at once placed it 

 among the exact sciences. Dalton had an analytical, experimental 

 turn of mind ; patient, persevering, and painstaking, supreme in 

 the laboratory, but almost destitute of social and literary in- 

 stincts. When asked why he did not marry, he replied that he 

 never had the time. One who had not time to seek a wife would 

 not likely have the time nor the desire to seek general culture. 

 So we are not surprised to hear him say that his entire library 

 could be carried upon his back, and scarcely half of these had 

 he read. 



Dalton always wore the plain, colorless garb of the Friends, 

 and only once appeared in public otherwise. When he was in 

 London in 1834 his friends desired to present him to the king, but 

 he refused to invest himself in the court-dress. He went arrayed 

 in the scarlet doctor's robe, perfectly unconscious of the brilliancy 

 of his attire ; he was a victim of his friends' innocent conspiracy, 

 for Dalton was color-blind. 



In 1864 the Royal Society, through its president, Major-General 

 Sabine, awarded the Copley medal to Charles Darwin, the author 

 of the " Origin of Species/' The president highly eulogized the 

 merits of his works, "stamped throughout with the impress of 

 the closest attention to minute details and accuracy of observa- 

 tion, combined with large powers of generalization/' In 1839, 

 upon his return from his voyage on the Beagle, the young natu- 

 ralist, for his excellent papers on volcanic phenomena, was elected 

 Fellow of the Royal Society, and at the anniversary meeting of 

 the society in November, 1853, the Royal medal was presented 

 him for his masterly treatise on " Coral Reefs." So, when the 

 " Origin of Species " appeared, it was not from an unknown au- 

 thor, but one who had already attained a world-wide reputation. 

 But no man's reputation, however great, could have saved so revo- 

 lutionary a work as the " Origin " from the most violent oppo- 

 sition. It called forth grave reviews, satires, wit, even personal 

 vituperation ; but Darwin, in his rural home in Kent, received it 

 all in a philosophic spirit, and abided his time. The " Origin of 



