ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON 147 



While the Society was thus pursuing its diversified and prosperous career, 

 Charles II, " founder and patron," had died, having entertained no inter- 

 course with the learned corporation during his later years, except to send it a 

 receipt for the cure of hydrophobia, compounded, after the manner of that 

 time, of as many simples (agrimony roots, dragon roots, star of the earth, 

 &c., &c.) as could well be disposed of in one preparation. Lord Brouncker 

 had resigned the presidency after fifteen years of acceptable service, and had 

 been followed in succession by Sir Joseph Williamson, (1677,) Sir Christopher 

 Wren, (IGSO,) Sir John Iloskins, (1682,) Sir Cyril Wyche, (1G83,) Samuel 

 Pepys, (1GS4,) Lord Carbery, (IGSG,) Lord Pembroke, (1G89,) Sir Robert 

 Southwell, (1G90,) Lord Halifax, (1G95,) and Lord Somers, (1698.) The 

 Society was soon to remove from the precarious quarters which it had here- 

 tofore occupied to a house of its own in Crane Court, Strand, and, as appears by 

 one of its statutes, had found reason to place some further restriction on the too 

 indiscriminate and easy admission of Fellows. 



On the withdrawal of Lord Somers, in 1703, Sir Isaac Newton was elected 

 to the presidency, the duties of which he continued to fulfil for 24 years with 

 exemplary punctuality. His treatise on Opticks was now presented to the 

 Society, a work prepared long before, but which he had decided to withhold 

 from publication during the lifetime of Hooke. The remark suggested by the 

 death of that able but morose and jealous man of science seems, therefore, to 

 be fully justified : La Socicte ij gagnc plus que la gcometnc 7i'ij perd ; but, as 

 if the sensitiveness of Newton was doomed never to be freed from impor- 

 tunate molestation, the dispute respecting the authorship of the htjinitesimal 

 analysis soon supervened; a dispute in which Newton, indeed, maintained his 

 usual reserve, but which his own partisans, equally with those of Leibnitz, con- 

 ducted with so much asperity and prejudice that the contest might have seemed 

 one of honor or interest between Grcrmany and England.* At the instance of 

 Leibnitz, a committee was appointed by the lloyal Society, in March, 1712, to 

 examine the evidence bearing on the matter in question, and, in April following, 

 were submitted, in a report, the reasons which led the committee " to reckon 

 Mr. Newton the first inventor." That this did not satisfy or silence the parti- 

 sans of Leibnitz will be readily believed ; but at this distance of time we may 

 acquiesce in the opinion pronounced by the historian of the Society, that 

 Newton was the inventor of Fluxions as early as 1666, but that Leibnitz has 

 the merit of having first given full publicity to his discovery of the Differential 

 Calculus in 1673. "Had Newton done this," says Mr. Weld, "a controversy, 

 painful in its nature and unsatisfactory in its results, would have been avoided. 

 But all admit that he labored more for the love of truth than of fame ; and 

 this is one of the reasons why Newton is the greatest of philosophers." 



This great man died, on the 20th March, 1727, being, perhaps, the only one 

 who lias ever lived whose genius and virtues could sustain the exaltation of 

 his epitaph : Sibi grantulentur mortalcs tale tanti/mfpie exstitissc humani generis. 

 He was succeeded in the presidency of the Society by Sir Hans Sloane, who 

 had long acted as secretary .and vice-president, and whose merits as a botanist, 

 habits of business and official assiduity, relieved the council of embarrassment 

 in a choice, even after Newton. Martin I'olkes, (elected 1741,) Earl of 

 Macclesfield, (1752,) Earl of Morton, (1764,) James Burrow, (1768,)' James 

 West, (1768,) Sir John Pringle, (1772,) bring down the succession in the 

 ■presidency to the protracted official term of Sir Joseph Banks, (1778 — 1820.) 

 There are points of interest, however, in this long interval, upon which it is 

 proper to touch even in so rapid a sketch as the present. 



* M. Aragfo seems to have been willing to make France a third party to this memorable 

 competition, for, in his Notices Biograpliicjues, vol. Ill, p. 522, he brings forward the claims 

 of 'his countryman, Fermat of Toulouse, as an earlier inventor of the Calculus than either 

 Newton or Leibnitz. 



